Spitting off tall buildings - By Dan Fante Page 0,32

constantly. Old incidents and humiliations from years before got re-viewed like the newsreel footage of rotting concentration camp bodies. My insatiable sexual behavior, my blackouts and drunkenness; all of it. I would be driving the streets in my cab and the pictures would come back again and again. Sometimes I’d have to pull over, pound the steering wheel, curse myself and scream out loud until the noise stopped.

An entire week was spent in my mind reenacting the five-minute occasion of my firing from the Night Manager gig at the East End Hotel. The embarrassment of being caught out by the ass-licking Shi, being talked down to by Mistofsky. Every remark was gone over, every phrase, every glance analyzed and replayed again and again. I became unable to focus on anything else.

My sleep got down to an hour or two a night again. I went back on the booze. Often it took a fifth to two fifths of Ten High at night after work to shut the noise off.

At the diner on Twelfth Avenue where I got my coffee every morning and where many of the cabbies from the Rodney garage ate, they had a new waitress, Betty. She was my height, five-five or five-six, but she easily weighed four hundred pounds. So fat, I noticed, that she was unable to fit properly behind her side of the counter. She had to scooch sideways like a huge crab in order to serve her customers. The vastness of the lard clinging to her caused her to huff and wheeze and snort as she oozed along.

After seeing her there for two mornings in a row my mind could not leave the shock of her fat alone. I found myself unable to stop staring at Betty. Studying her. Why, I said to myself, why in fucking punctured Jesus would Milt, the owner, hire such an odious, absurd, pig-faced amalgam of dog shit? Did he think that his cab driver clientele would put up with a sweaty-chested, belching, rhinoceros-butted blimp, dripping perspiration and body smell, serving their meatloaf and tuna salad sandwiches? What the possible fuck could his reasoning be for having her around?

I was paying Milt for my coffee and buttered bagel at the register and eyeballing the aberrant monstrosity when my mind went ‘external’ before I could stop it. ‘Milt,’ I blurted, pointing, slamming my dollar and change down to pay, ‘is that new?’

‘What?’

‘That…human.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, skewering my check on the paper spike by the register, ‘Claire quit. Moved to Fort Lee. Better schools for her kids. That’s Betty.’

‘Okay, but why…why did you hire…that?’

‘That’s name is Betty.’

I leaned toward him to speak confidentially. The thing was traversing the counter a dozen or so feet away, grunting and snorting, refilling a customer’s coffee cup, raising and lowering its eighty-pound arm to reveal a huge dark circle of sweat. Beads of moistness coated its massive cheeks and hog snout. ‘Milt,’ I said, ‘Your Betty is the fattest fucking bloated distended pile of living waste I have ever seen. What the hell is she doing here…around normal people?’

‘She’s my niece.’

I had to go on. It was impossible to stop myself. ‘There should be fucking legislation about keeping something that sickening out of sight.’

‘Soo…you don’t like fat people?’

‘That’s not people, that’s oil mountain! That huge bitch is a rolling vat of bacteria, a living, wheezing, farting health department violation. Man, don’t you know that it’s physically impossible for a fucking hippo her size to reach her feet with a bar of soap, let alone her twat and private parts?’

Milt pushed my change across the counter. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘don’t come back in here again. Take your coffee business somewheres else.’

I scooped the coins up. Consciously, somewhere in my brain, I was aware that I’d lost it completely. ‘Let me ask you a question,’ I bellowed. ‘What the fuck do you think a lard-globe that huge has to do to have sex? To procreate. How does it fuck? A person would have to have a twenty-inch dick to have intercourse with an elephant brontosaurus of her dimensions.’

Milt was walking away.

‘Hey,’ I yelled again, pushing the paper bag containing the coffee and bagel back across the counter and off the end so that it fell to the floor, broke open and spilled, ‘fuck you, zoo keeper! Fuck you and her and all the pig-animal infected human hogs everywhere!’

Milt perused me, untying his apron and coming around from behind the counter. But I was too quick; out the door and