86'd: A Novel - By Dan Fante Page 0,58

like Hulk Hogan but fucks me like an eight-year-old choir boy!”

“I’m here for you, Ms. Sorache. My services come free of charge. With a willing smile.”

“Shut up, Bruno. I’m into pretty young guys is all. If I wasn’t I’d take you up on it. Look at me. I’m twenty-nine, for chrissake, and all I do is strike out.”

“Keep swingin’, Che-Che, you’ll hit one. But you might try not eating the picture off the front of the menu. I mean, before you order, make sure that you’re getting the real deal.”

“No shit!” my client whispered.

We arrived at West Point at seven a.m. My customer was completely stoned, sipping straight from a glass decanter of vodka in the car’s minibar. Her eyes were two huge black holes.

After we entered the compound, Che-Che pointed toward an elegant stone cottage at the far end of the parade grounds. “Pull over at the front door of that house,” she said. “That’s the commandant’s residence.”

“I don’t feel good about this,” I said. “You’re pretty whacked. You could get us both in a huge jackpot.”

“I was on a shoot here last year for Elite. A cover. I know what I’m doing. Trust me, okay? You’re about to see just how far a smile and a tiny pair of tits can take a girl.”

“What the hell are we doing here, Che-Che?”

“We’re having fun, dummy. Calm down.”

“Okay, but let’s put the drugs in the trunk. This is military, for chrissake. I don’t feel like going to jail on Sunday morning.”

Che-Che was grinning. “Damn, Bruno. You come on like some kind of removed, edgy hardass, but down deep you’re a pussy.”

“But not a stupid pussy.

After I stowed my client’s cocaine plate in the boot I pulled the limo around to the front of the commandant’s cottage.

Tall, beautiful Che-Che, her Nikon around her neck, her tits half out of her warm-up jacket, weaved her way up to the residence door, then knocked loudly.

A short time later a tall, gray-haired guy, wearing a bathrobe, opens up. From twenty-five feet away, behind the wheel, I watch as Che-Che smiles and charms the colonel.

Back in the limo a few minutes later my client is beaming. “Pull the Benz out on to the middle of the parade grounds on the grass,” she commands. “And go get my fucking toot out of the trunk.”

“No! Have a drink. Settle down, for chrissakes.”

“Fucking pussy!”

Not long later, perhaps a quarter of an hour, there are nine hundred cadets in full dress uniforms, in formation, on the grass, ready to march.

Che-Che Sorache, filmless Nikon camera is hand, half her body protruding through the car’s moonroof, begins snapping away, unable to stop herself from laughing.

On the way back to Manhattan my customer is now very drunk and very sleepy and slurring her words.

“Hey, Bruno?”

“Yeah, Che-Che.”

“That was a kick, right? I mean all those boys marching around on the grass, looking so pretty, on Sunday morning. Fun, huh?”

“Right.” I said. “Just great. Now go to sleep. We’ll be back in town in an hour.”

“When you see Nana, don’t tell her about this, okay? She’d be so annoyed with me.”

“I won’t tell anybody, Che-Che.”

“Hey, Bruno, you’re not really a pussy. You’re a good friend. I mean it.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Ditto. It’s all in a day’s work.”

My first-class airplane ride the next day, featuring half a dozen double Jack Daniels, was paid for by Che-Che.

Back in L.A. at Dav-Ko, up in my room, after unpacking, I sat on my bed and sipped at a beer, opening my mail. I had returned to the madness of Los Angeles. I was home.

Among the bills and junk mail were two thick manuscript envelopes I had addressed to myself and put return postage on. I knew what they were. They were publisher rejections. My short story manuscript had been returned. Both the boilerplate letters said essentially the same thing. They weren’t looking for more short fiction. They were cutting back.

Flipping the pages of each manuscript I concluded that neither one had even been read.

I could feel my stomach tighten. Once again I had failed. Nobody even looked at my work. Across my room was a wall of books. All I had ever wanted was to have my words rest among theirs. My Kafka and Shakespeare and Miller and Steinbeck and Selby and O’Neill and Tennessee Williams and Wallant and Hemingway. I was a forty-two-year-old loser. A man who’d fallen between the cracks of an empty life. A freak. Not a writer but something else—another dime-a-dozen lost Los Angeles