Spitting off tall buildings - By Dan Fante Page 0,43

a tattoo the guy had and go on about it until they were convinced that I was really telling the truth. Then I’d make a face to let them know that I’d fooled them again. Then too, me being in their apartment made it easier with their dad because it took some of the heat off.

Bert’s three-year Workman’s Comp lawsuit finally got settled and the amount came out to be forty thousand dollars. Robert Edward Francis Duffy took his one-third off the top which was the agreed split but Bert was left with almost twenty-seven K, which, according to him and Bob Duffy, was a decent hit.

He celebrated by staying drunk and snorting coke and vanishing from the building for seventy-two hours. After he sobered up and got contrite he bought rollerblade rollerskates for his girls and a pearl necklace for beautiful Angel-Lee.

One morning several days after the check was safely in his bank, I accompanied Bert to the OTB on Broadway. It was not yet 10 a.m. but he was half drunk and snorting crack again.

He wasn’t much of a gambler and due to his coke and booze problem his relationship with his family had gotten worse. The next day when he came to with a new hangover he discovered that Angel was gone and his savings account was at zero balance.

She’d had enough. It turned out that her and Tall Jimmy, the bartender at her job, had been having a thing and what was left of the settlement cash had provided them with the motivation to relocate together to the southwest.

Bert stayed drunk and high on coke for another week, ignoring his manager’s job and his kids. When he was completely broke and his credit was gone, he started in on wine. The girls, in fear of their dad, came up to my room. At night they slept on my floor in their sleeping bags.

Chapter Twenty-six

IT WAS RAINING so I had my jacket on and I was on my way out to a hypno appointment with Harry when I opened my door and saw Bert moving the twins’ mattress and two boxfuls of clothes up the stairs.

He was real bad: shaking, hung over, his dick in the dirt. But he had a plan.

Angel’s welfare check had just come in the mail; two hundred and ninety-seven dollars. Bert had signed his wife’s name on the back and cashed the check at the liquor store on Ninth Avenue where they knew him. He handed the wadded up allotment money over to me. Mostly all twenties.

That morning he had quit his manager’s job. He was setting out to find Angel and bring her back. Part of his plan was for me to look after the girls for a couple of weeks.

I watched him shake, then took the money. Together with the girls we moved the mattress and the boxes the rest of the way into my room.

But Bert was gone longer than two weeks and my own checks were barely enough to cover expenses. It was almost a month before we even received a call on the hall pay phone. Two hundred and sixty of the two hundred and ninety-seven dollars had gone out immediately to pay for an emergency room visit when I came home buzzed, tripped going up the stairs, and hit my forehead on the banister. Twelve stitches.

I had the key to the building’s storage room and Bert’s permission, if necessary, to sell or pawn his stuff, whatever was there. Twice that first month the girls and I had to appropriate one of D’Agostino Market’s shopping carts and wheel a load down Ninth Avenue to the hock shop. First thing was their dad’s big TV and speakers, then a VCR and a fax machine with the dial buttons missing.

There was more stuff but when Ed Dorobek, the new rooming-house manager, discovered me going into the storage room, he replaced the padlock. I was denied further admittance unless Bert was present.

Chapter Twenty-seven

I KNEW EXACTLY nothing about eleven-year-old girls.

It was summer. The end of June. Having twin girls around, out of school, in and out of my room, was annoying at first. The up side was that with less time by myself my drinking and my mind’s raging and crazy self-talking stayed pretty much under control. They were good kids so I made the adjustment. The hardest thing for me was the heat at night and not sleeping.

During the day I maintained on cheap whiskey and the occasional short dog