Spitting off tall buildings - By Dan Fante Page 0,1

Two-seventy Madison is on the right side. Take the elevator to the tenth floor. Ten. You can remember that. Ten. The address is there on the paper I gave you. If you have any more questions, consult the information on your placement form. I’d provide you with a detailed color-coded map with arrows and circles and little stick men except I’ve got five more “clients” to see on my bench right now. I’m not a tour guide.’

‘Can I bum a cigarette?’

She made another face then dug into the pocket of her skirt, producing a pack, handing me one. ‘Anything else?’

I had matches. I lit it myself. ‘I’m not trying to be funny. Which way’s the Empire State Building? I’ve never seen it.’

Herrera yanked the door open, sucked in a last drag on her Newport, started to go in, got interrupted by a thought, then stopped suddenly and turned back. ‘Let me see your copy of the placement form again,’ she demanded.

I dug in my pocket and handed it back.

‘Crap! Jesus! I forgot to write her name down…Ask for Nancy. You have to ask for Nancy.’

‘Okay.’

‘Can you remember? It’s not on the job order. You’d better write it down!’

‘Nancy. I ask for Nancy. I’ll remember. I knew a Nancy once. Her whole name was Fat Nancy.’

Herrera’s eyes rolled, she turned, flicking her cigarette toward the street, exhaled a deep sigh, then went back inside. The door sucked closed behind her.

My hourly pay was $8.

Having a job provided the money for me to move to a better place. I wasn’t sleeping because of my yakking brain and the constant break-ins and the flimsy locks on the room doors at the Thirty-fourth Street YMCA. I’d been paying twenty-two bucks a night plus tax. I’d walk to the bathroom to take a squirt and have to watch buttfucking in the communal showers.

The weekly rent for a single room in the rooming house I moved to on Fifty-first Street was $150. That left about seventy-five dollars each week after taxes to go toward other expenses. In the new place the bathroom was down the hall too but it was a one-person deal with the added amenity of a locking door.

For fourteen consecutive days after my first day at Schwermann, the thumb and the first finger on my right hand were red and blistered from using a mechanical staple-puller gadget that pinched my skin. At lunch break on my last Friday at the job I had shooters, beer back and bar pretzels with one of my temp co-workers, an actor named Brad O’Sullivan. Brad’s spot at the job was the next area down from me in the windowless file storage room at Schwermann. His assignment was to separate the reports after I’d pulled the staples and taken the report covers off. There was George too. He was one down from Brad. George went from tab to tab in the reports counting the numbers of felt marker marks in the boxes and recording the data.

Me and Brad drank and ate pretzels and did some math on a bar napkin. Between the two of us we’d torn apart about fifteen hundred reports. I held up the hand and showed him the blister on my thumb. Brad shook his head. By the time we were headed back from our lunch break, I’d decided fuck it.

Herrera at Olson’s Temp acted uninterested about me quitting Schwermann when I called her the next Monday morning. But then she began asking questions about what my boss had said when I said I was leaving. What I said. What Nancy had said back. That shit. I had to sell Herrera, convince her that I hadn’t been petulant or acted like an asshole, in order for her to trust me and send me out again.

While we talked on the phone she looked up my file. I’d come in on time every day except for a couple of times. She saw that there had been no supervisor complaints. After the interrogation it was determined that I would be eligible for reassignment.

I could hear her wheezing while she fidgeted through the files on her desk. ‘Okay, now I remember you,’ she gasped. ‘Dante! New in town. Right?’

‘Right.’

‘Still here, Dante? Still lost?’

‘Still here.’

‘That’s just swell, Dante,’ she said. ‘What I’ll do is go over the list of the new phone-in assignments that’ve come in. I do it once a day for each of our people calling in for reassignment. Once only. When you call in remember that. If