Spitting off tall buildings - By Dan Fante Page 0,38

concerned about my drinking than anything else. Also about my anger fits while I was drinking and sober. He was curious to know the kinds of things that set me off; what I thought about this and what I thought about that: ‘What did you think then, Bruno?…After that happened, how did you feel?…You must’ve been upset.’ Blah, blah, blah…Blah, blah, blah.

One week into the deal, after the individual sessions and twice-a-day in group, Jack gave me some news. ‘Good news,’ he said. He had determined that I was not crazy. That the twenty-four-hour-a-day voices in my head and my behavior were, to him, symptoms of alcoholism.

According to Jack, being an alcoholic is a mind disease like manic depression. It describes the way an alkie’s mind has come to work. Sober or drunk. He said that my depressions and rages and disgusting degenerate behavior and the other stuff were by-products of my alcoholism.

Alkies, Jack says, are characterized not only by their drinking, which of course is the main big symptom, but also by their craziness while they are sober. After a certain point in the progression of the disease a person’s perceptions change. There is an automatic mental distortion of information; damaged, fucked mental software. With and without a drink.

Jack says that I had developed this type of ‘personality’ over time. A new character. To keep my mind comfortable and under control, my disease required me to drink more and more because things in the world become more and more unacceptable with my type of alcoholic ‘personality.’

Booze, Jack says, can work real well for years, like a pill, to treat this personality. But eventually it has to turn on you, stop working, and bite you on the ass. According to Jack, that’s what happened to me.

He said this: that there was nothing really he could do to help me stop the depressions or trying to kill myself. In his experience, still-drinking alcoholics like me, as a functioning, walking-around class of people, are the furthest from any kind of emotional or spiritual peace. From God.

At the end of the mandatory ten days, on the morning of my release from the hospital, Jack said that if I continued with booze I would be like someone carrying cans of gasoline to a fire. He said there wasn’t much hope.

I liked Jack. They were letting me out and they could no longer hold me for any reason so I was completely straight with him. I said honestly that I did not agree. To me I was chemically imbalanced. I needed some kind of medication; Prozak or Elavil or lithium. One of those. Other people on my ward who took mood stabilizers had my same symptoms. Jack refused to give me anything to help so I got up and walked out.

Chapter Twenty-two

ME AND MY rooming-house manager, Bert, had always gotten on fairly well. Bert was part Indian. American Indian. Big and mean but he liked me because we both drank whiskey and we were both fans of the New York Mets.

He’d arrived in Manhattan five years before me with his old lady Angel-Lee and their two kids. At the time the couple met and started a relationship he was forty-one, Angel was nineteen. She had been a dancer, the prettiest black girl in Fort Smith.

For his first few years in New York Bert worked in construction assembly, steel framing on skyscrapers. Then, by chance, he discovered his real aptitude; the one for insurance scams and welfare swindling.

One day at the job site he slipped on a cable spool, fell, and got a minor strain in his back. He decided to fake it a little and take a few days off to watch the end of the baseball playoffs on TV. His job foreman sent him to a doctor. There in the waiting room Bert ran into a guy he had once worked with. Another Indian. The guy had a limp and was walking with a cane but he was wearing a colorful Hawaiian sports shirt. In their conversation it came out that the fellow had been collecting $540 tax free every two weeks for the last year for his own back injury. Currently, he was spending his afternoons making bets and limping up and down the steps to the Club House at Aquaduct racetrack.

That was the beginning.

Three years later Bert was deep into a Workman’s Comp lawsuit and opening his mail twice a month to find over a thousand dollars’ worth of checks from the