86'd: A Novel - By Dan Fante Page 0,68

find a temporary roommate deal through an apartment rental agency in Santa Monica: five hundred a month, first and last month’s rent payable immediately.

The building was on Lamanda Street in West L.A., about three miles from the beach. I had the back bedroom facing an apartment building across the courtyard, and I had my own bathroom and use of the kitchen. My only furnishings were a bed and a dresser and a table. But Che-Che’s money was coming in handy.

Robby LeCash was my roommate. The guy was a sixty-two-year-old jock and fitness trainer at a health club in Marina del Rey, on his way to Europe for four weeks to teach kung fu and endurance training to one of his actor clients who was preparing to film an action flick about a global-warming-mutated, man-eating strain of fish. Buffed-out Robby was totally excited about the trip. Our deal hinged on a quickie proposition. He was leaving in two days and needed someone to move in immediately. The clincher turned out to be that I had to agree to watch and walk and feed his bulldog, Tub, while he was away. No sweat. While sitting in his living room I reached down to pet the farting old beast and we made friends easily. Tub’s main preoccupations appeared to be sleeping and breaking wind.

I put my books in storage and then moved my clothes and computer in before noon the next day. Later in the afternoon, walking the neighborhood, with my driver’s license now indefinitely revoked, I found a bicycle shop on Washington Boulevard and made an impulse purchase: a used, beat-up, beach-cruiser bike with a chain lock. Sixty-five bucks cash. It wasn’t much but I was riding again.

But then, after Robby was gone a day or two, I could feel myself beginning to sink. A wall of wet muck swallowed me and saturated my brain. I found myself no longer able to do the only thing that had ever saved me from myself: I could not write.

I’d turn on the computer and stare at the keys and blank screen for an hour at a time. There was nothing to write. I had nothing to say.

Unlike jail—where after the first few days of shaking it out and detoxing from tobacco, I’d spent my time reading books in enforced confinement, resigned to my situation, chatting occasionally with my cellmate, a kid calling himself Swank who filibustered me with stories of convenience-store stickups and pimping his girlfriend, then grunted loudly as he jerked off every evening—I was now alone. My only companion at LeCash’s apartment was my mind.

Each night, through my room’s thin curtains, the exterior patio lights of the apartment across the courtyard flooded my bare walls, making sleep an impossibility. Without sleep my head’s malignant conjuration persisted.

During daylight hours I began to take long walks in the neighborhood or ride my bike to the boardwalk at Venice Beach to exhaust myself enough to pass out on LeCash’s living room couch, next to Tub. It didn’t work very well. Nothing was working. I had been weeks without a drink and the messages from my brain were getting louder and louder until the self-hate and the endless replay of my squandering stupidities and the futility of my life—even breathing in and out—demanded that I stop it. Kill it. Standing at my balcony rail I began trying to amass the courage to throw myself to the concrete twenty or thirty feet below. The spell lasted four days.

Tub the bulldog was my only salvation. When he’d get lonely on the living room couch he’d gimp his way into my bedroom, see me on the balcony, or at the computer viewing porno sites and book reviews, then limp over and force me to pet him by grabbing my arm, saturating my leg or shirtsleeves with his slobber.

My cell phone, which I hated and rarely answered and seldom turned on, had been collecting messages from Dav-Ko. Three in total over the last few days. “Bruno, call the office.” I ignored the shit.

At Safeway supermarket on Centinela Avenue, a few blocks away, my madness culminated unexpectedly.

Tub and I were there partly because LeCash’s refrigerator contents consisted of four types of organic juices and vegetables and brown paper bags of grains and gluten-free shit that was inedible, and partly because a dog needs beef to sustain himself. Real food, not organic snot compressed into little brown pellets from the Whole Foods pet department.

So, with Tub dragging behind, I rolled my cart