One
A fucking cosmic shit shower.
Two
I have no idea why I am crazy and angry…
Three
The next morning, wearing the same puked-on tie from my…
Four
It took three full carloads in my Pontiac to get…
Five
I was beginning to see dead people. They were not…
Six
As it turned out I was more than half wrong…
Seven
Before dawn the next morning came the onset of the…
Eight
Working in the limo business in L.A. is a bizarre…
Nine
I picked up the phone after midnight thinking it was…
Ten
After returning to Hollywood it took me a week to…
Eleven
The next morning I picked up one of our freebie…
Twelve
I hate banks. And lines. I get uncomfortable and impatient…
Thirteen
The sex thing with Portia continued and I was becoming…
Fourteen
That night I got back to Dav-Ko after one a.m.,…
Fifteen
The towering white-haired figure that stood in the hospital doorway…
Sixteen
Dav-Ko’s senior partner apparently wanted to keep tabs on the…
Seventeen
Later that afternoon I got the number of AA and…
Eighteen
A week later David Koffman was gone and I was…
Nineteen
That night I got back to Dav-Ko after dropping Stedman…
Twenty
Back at the office in the chauffeur’s room, through the…
Twenty-One
By Friday that week the Malibu shoot with Stedman was…
Twenty-Two
It happened to me rarely these days. Working and making…
Twenty-Three
I’d never had two blackouts in a row before. Until…
Twenty-Four
The following week, Wednesday, mostly sober for four days except…
Twenty-Five
That Sunday morning at three a.m. a day later my…
Twenty-Six
It was one-forty-five in the afternoon several days later. Attorney…
Twenty-Seven
The next afternoon, following up on my plan to cut…
Twenty-Eight
The following day I was back driving Che-Che’s nana, J. C. Smart,…
Twenty-Nine
On my way back to Dav-Ko on Sunset Boulevard, after…
Thirty
In the end I served fourteen days in jail. The…
Thirty-One
That night, after I set up all the bottles on…
Thirty-Two
The first couple of days at the beginning of my…
Thirty-Three
The death of my brain came two weeks later. By…
Thirty-Four
That Sunday in the early afternoon, after the retreat ended,…
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books by Dan Fante
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
one
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Bruno. Our new projects team met on Friday. Second quarter numbers for all Canonball Press editions are down. The decision was out of my hands, unfortunately. They are rescheduling your book and all new short story anthologies for next year at the earliest.
My best advice is for you to look on this as a temporary setback and nothing more. I know we’ll publish UNTIL THE FAT LADY SINGS…eventually.”
Evanston Wright, Senior Editor
A fucking cosmic shit shower.
Up to the minute I opened the e-mail from Canonball Press I’d thought the five years and three hundred pages it had taken to put my book together had been worth it. Only three months before the pricks had sent me their acceptance letter and a token five-hundred-dollar advance. I would finally be a published short story writer.
Wrong.
I printed out Canonball’s e-mail, underlined the word eventually in black marker, then taped the goddamn thing to the wall in my room, above my desk. Eventually I’d start fucking dead chimpanzee corpses too—eventually.
Suddenly I realized how much I hated my goddamn computer and all computers for the ease with which they delivered such terrible news. Slamming my fist on my writing desk I cursed the day a year before that I’d allowed my friend Eddy Dorobek to flimflam me into buying a used laptop from him and giving up my dead father’s rickety old Underwood portable. Fuck Eddy Dorobek! and all software and DVDs and e-mail and instant messages that instantly ruined people’s lives. Fuck Google and MySpace too. And fuck fucking Evanston Wright at Canonball Press for not even conceding to me the courtesy of a goddamn stamp and a signature on a signed piece of paper.
Still left on my telephone’s answering machine was a two-year-old message from Hubert Selby, Jr., my literary mentor, my favorite writer. Still un-erased. A thirty-second crack in time that had altered everything and changed my life.
To heal myself and interrupt my brain’s fury I pressed the “Saved Messages” button on my phone.
I’d heard his words a thousand times now, listened to them over and over like a hit song—from my writing table while eating dinner or reading the newspaper, or posing in the mirror or getting in and out of the shower. While jerking off or listening to a Van Morrison CD or doing leg-lifts on the floor. I’d even played the message for the old guy I rented my room from, Uncle Bill, and for my sister, Lucia. Selby’s words had saved my sanity.
I pressed play.
…Dante? Bruno Dante? Cubby Selby here. You gave me your manuscript a few weeks ago…and the other