Spitting off tall buildings - By Dan Fante Page 0,8
found in the want-ads; Workpower. I was drinking like always but the depression was okay, under control. I showed up for my assignments on time and didn’t lose any days.
I like change. Workpower sends its people all over New York for its temp gigs and I began to learn how to get around the city; Wall Street, Union Square, Hunts Point in the Bronx, downtown Brooklyn. I became familiar with the important bus routes and began to get a functional knowledge of the subways.
Edna Green was my contact at Workpower. She was better than Herrera with the nicotine fingers. Calmer. If I’d call in to quit a deal Edna never pressed me for excuses or asked about what the supervisor said that made me want to leave or what I said back after what they said or what I did then. That crap. If she received no serious complaints on the employer-return-form everything was okay. I needed work. Edna needed to fill jobs.
I like to come and go. Nothing else. I don’t want to hold stock or participate in the goddam profit sharing, or be groomed for something, or climb someone’s rectum company ladder. The personality puke that always seems to go along with a regular gig - the pissing matches and favoritism, the politics, like what happened so quickly at the movie theater job - can nearly always be avoided if you stick to temp work; one call and a request for reassignment usually repairs any fucked circumstance.
But even with somebody nice like Edna you don’t want to get bumped working temp. Getting bumped creates problems.
I did okay for a while, did half a dozen assignments without incident, then because of drinking and miscommunication, I got blown out twice in a row.
Number one was when I was a fill-in night dispatcher for a ten-truck twenty-four-hour commercial plumbing service. It was supposed to be a month-long post but I got canned after the fourth day because the boss’s wife disliked me and said that I appeared to always look sleepy when I came to work.
Number two happened back to back with number one. Edna sent me on a high-stress mail sorter/collector gig at an office building cattycorner across the street from Carnegie Hall. I’d had a couple of shooters on my lunch break the second day. Just enough to take the edge off. I was bumped for making a mouth gesture to the lesbian Puerto Rican amphetamine-sucking freak supervisor everyone on the staff had nicknamed ‘Duke.’ ‘Duke’ embarrassed me in front of a pretty secretary. She loudly reproved me for not being fast enough when making the rounds with the mail cart. I put my hand to my face and made a licking motion, forcing my tongue in and out between my fingers.
After ‘Duke,’ when I’d call in, Edna would tell me that business was quiet or some other shit which I knew was code for ‘Take a walk, asshole.’
For a week I stayed in my room and worked on my play. It had a new direction and a new name, Calliope. About an intense, selfish carnival barker on the Southern circuit who wants to become an evangelist. Better than Elmer Gantry because my guy discovers that he really has powers to heal. But he’s also a selfish scumbag which makes for a nice twist. Act II, Scene i.
Chapter Six
THE EAST END Hotel/Apartment is located on the east side of Manhattan on Fifty-first Street between Third Avenue and Second Avenue. Nowhere near East End Avenue.
It is a small, fifty-room deal that serves free rolls and bagels and coffee in the lobby to its guests every morning from seven to ten o’clock. It was once remodeled, years ago, and needs it again.
The ad I saw in the Sunday Times read: ‘Rsdnt Nt Mgr Est Sd Htl Slry+Furn Apt. Snd Res.’ The ad gave the address of an office building on Second Avenue and a suite number where the Res should be mailed. I’d lived at hotels and I once knew a guy with cancer named Phil who owned a fifteen-unit motel on Ocean Avenue in Long Beach in L.A. called The Captain’s Lodge. For years old Phil had been on tour with Johnnie Ray and saved enough money playing the piano to retire and buy the motel. When his cancer got bad and he had to take his heavy pain meds, he paid me to cover for him at the desk three or four nights a week. I’d check people in