86'd: A Novel - By Dan Fante Page 0,12

anywhere, anytime. Smart. Very smart.

Dav-Ko was ready to roll.

But the dispatcher we hired was a different story. A woman. To my annoyance I came to discover that David Koffman had developed an affinity for snotty British accents. I’d known him to be overly impressed by status and money and New York fashion but it had never clouded his good judgment before.

Her New York driver’s license said that her name was Pat Waltz but on her job application she claimed to be Portia Darforth-Keats, and she confided that she was a distant relative of the British poet John Keats.

Waltz was thirty-two years old but her physical appearance was that of unearthed, well-scrubbed zombie with a pretty face. She was an ex-smoker turned nicotine gum chewer. Her constant chomping was endless and annoying and apparently unconscious.

Portia was my height, five foot six or seven, but weighed no more than a hundred pounds. She wore black horn-rimmed Gucci glasses and her boy’s haircut was dyed Madonna white blond. Somewhere along the line she had surgically endowed herself with what appeared to be two NFL footballs for breasts. These two incongruous protrusions would arrive in a room long before the skeleton attached to them. When she sat down I noted that it would take three of her to fill one of our office swivel chairs—excluding her tits.

According to Ms. Darforth-Keats she was educated at Grafton College in London and during our interview she confided two things that told me all I needed to know about her lopsided personality: (a) As a teenager she’d developed an eating disorder (she said she was a recovering bulimic), and (b) she had a strong personal affinity for gay men. Her lifelong best friends were all gay. Swell.

I learned that she’d obtained her green card and U.S. residency by marrying a New York City Times Square beat cop, Bernard Waltz. Her letters of reference testified that she was good with computers and had been a part-time nanny for ten years and then a dispatcher-bookkeeper for a Manhattan ambulance company. She’d recently slapped her ex Bernie with a restraining order then headed west on American Airlines.

Waltz’s vocal manner made her sound more like Queen Elizabeth’s personal assistant than a half-alive Biafra survivor. The woman was a yakky know-it-all and a snob and clearly held herself above all lesser humans. Looking across my desk at her the thought of having sex with this skeletal, nicotine-sucking phony made me want to reconsider my own sexual orientation. I immediately concluded that it would be impossible for someone with her uptight wiring to deal with our staff of homegrown L.A. beach-boy chauffeurs. Weekends in the limo business are made up of brutal hours and handling overworked drivers during the grind of back-to-back ten-hour shifts would take its toll. Her uptight attitude would do her in and the shit would fly. Bottom line: The woman was wrong for the job. And the notion that I’d have to spend some of my days at Dav-Ko cooped up in an office with her set me craving a handful of painkillers.

But David Koffman was the boss and his reality block was impossible to overcome. He’d wanted class for Dav-Ko and had somehow decided that Portia was it. He had interviewed her separately the day after I began training the drivers, then hired her on the spot. As it turned out my interview with Portia was a formality.

When Koffman arrived back at our office with Francisco I pulled him aside into our dispatch room and imparted my personal assessment of Pat Waltz. “Look, David, she’s a puker and a whackjob,” I said. “I don’t like her. She’s wrapped way too tight to deal with a staff of young drivers. And as far as I’m concerned that accent of hers is a ding—no plus whatever.”

“Portia’s hired, Bruno. That’s that,” he hissed, balancing his gargantuan frame on the edge of the dispatch desk after pouring himself a cup of coffee.

“Ouch! Thanks for not telling me.”

“I think she’s fabulous. I made a spontaneous decision.”

“Well, it’s a mistake, David. The woman’s got emotional baggage up the wazoo. She looks like she hasn’t taken solid nourishment in ten years. Bottom line, she doesn’t know how to talk to people.”

Koffman was now sorting through the day’s mail. “That’s your opinion,” he said distractedly.

“It sure is. Apparently she’s addicted to nicotine gum too.”

“So…you’re saying that I should steer clear of hiring a person because of how they look?”

“She says that all her best friends are pole