Fante

Image Missing

The decision had been made to shut down Pacific Ocean Park for the winter of 1963–64. The place had fallen irreversibly into debt. Attendance was down and the dream of a Disneyland at the beach was gone. The carnies scattered, scrambling to get hooked up with the few road shows left in America. After I’d quit and given up my apartment, I moved back to my parents’ home in Malibu, went back to school, and flunked out of Santa Monica City College. The only high spot in my short college career was my theater arts class. I’d taken it as an elective for the easy credit. Somehow, the time I had spent in fantasy as a boy playing out cowboy characters and letting my imagination run wild had helped transform me into a fairly decent actor.

Of course John Fante had utter contempt for the profession, as he did for agents and TV writers and film directors and almost all movie people. During the last few years of my education, on the rare occasions that we actually talked to each other, he promoted the idea of my becoming a plumber or an electrician. “You’re no genius, kid,” he’d say. “Get yourself an honest career. Work with your hands.”

When my mother told him I was doing well in a small college production of A Streetcar Named Desire, he sneered, “An actor! That figures. The kid is hopeless. Whatever he does, there’s always an angle. In that boy’s life any scheme is preferable to an honest day’s work.”

I became friends with two guys in my short college career. The first was a kid named Ray Sanchez, a tall, very funny, outgoing Latino guy. He wasn’t really a student. The only reason Ray went to City College at all was for the purpose of selling grass and pills and making dope contacts with the other students. Fucking up his life was Ray’s real talent.

His uncle Benny managed a motel on Lincoln Boulevard, and in my brief career at college we spent several afternoons there ditching class. Ray came from a lousy family and his pops was a drunk and a doper, in and out of jail, so the motel became Ray’s hideout, his home away from home. Our crash pad.

Luckily for Ray he could come and go at the motel as he pleased. He would pull his car into the parking lot, say hi to his uncle at the desk, and then grab the key to a room. We’d spend the rest of the day watching TV, drinking, and hanging out.

The only stipulation from Uncle Benny was that the room we used be clean for a new guest and the towels and sheets be replaced from the supply room before we left.

Ray Sanchez’s most important talent was with women. He was a good-looking kid, and having downers and uppers and dope and the gift of gab gave him a distinct advantage with the ladies. On one occasion the girl he’d brought along with us did him first and then me. No problem. Ray was laughing and cracking jokes the whole time. Some guys have the gift. Sanchez had it big time.

Then one day Ray was gone. I asked around school and found out from another student that my friend had been popped and had gone to the can. Then, several days later, I dropped by the motel and asked Uncle Benny where his nephew was and if he was okay. I was ordered off his property and told never to come back.

After Ray’s disappearance, I made friends with a kid in my English literature class named Charles Wellington Bosworth. Chuckles was a wild kid and pretty crazy when drunk. We began to spend time together. We were both flunking out for nonattendance of classes, but kept bumping into each other at a coffee shop on Twentieth Street. Chuckles had just taken a job selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door and wanted me to quit school and give the gig a try.

One hot December night the Santa Ana winds were blowing and me and Chuckles had just won a few bucks playing eight ball at the Billiard Den. We were drinking beer and driving down Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica in his beat-up VW Bug when we stopped for a light.

With no warning, Chuckles popped the shifter into neutral and suddenly jumped out. The car in front of us was a Benz sedan with a pretty woman behind the wheel. Chuckles rushed up to her passenger door, opened it, and jumped in.

“Sophia,” he yelled, “I love you. Don’t leave me!”

The woman, of course, was scared stiff. Chuckles looked at her closely. “You’re not Sophia! Jesus. Fuck. You don’t even look like Sophia! Who the fuck are you?”

With that he jumped out of her car and began running down the double line on Wilshire screaming, “Christ is my savior! Bob Dylan is a faggot! Save yourself!” I liked Chuckles a lot.

Chuckie got me an interview with the vacuum cleaner company on Pico Boulevard and I showed up in my POP manager’s duds, my only suit. After I was hired, Chuckie received some kind of percentage sales bump for bringing me in. My pal was always shooting angles.

The sales trainer of the company partnered us up as a selling team. Because I already had the right uniform and because of my carny background it was an easy fit for me.

Our co–field managers were two weekend Muscle Beach bodybuilders named Ron and Darren. Both were buff and acted macho but (secretly in those days) were batting from the other side of the plate.

After the morning sales meeting, Chuckles and I would buy a six-pack on the way to our territory and be ready to hit the street. It was fun at first.

At ten o’clock we’d begin knocking on doors and setting up our two-hour dinnertime appointments to demo our Kirbys, offering our customers five hundred redeemable Blue Chip Stamps whether they bought a vacuum cleaner or not.

Three weeks into the deal, I was bringing in decent money, not as much as in my POP days, but a few hundred a week. I’d simply done what I’d been taught by the carnies at Pacific Ocean Park: never take no for an answer.

Then, one day, my vacuum cleaner sales career ended before sundown. On this day our assigned area was the Westchester section of L.A. Chuckles and I already had a good buzz going and were knocking on doors offering books of stamps to come back and do our song-and-dance sales pitch after dinner that night, when both husband and wife were at home.

We stopped at a house like many others we visited, an expedient, post–World War II, slapped-together, twelve-hundred-square-foot cracker box in a planned subdivision. We’d been striking out that morning and between us, after knocking on many doors, had landed only one set appointment.

It was my turn to do the knocking next, and I did what I always did when I got to the front door. With my brown-envelope demo kit under my arm, I banged loudly. Rap rap rap rap!

No answer.

Chuckles is behind me, watching from back on the sidewalk thirty feet away. “C’mon, ace,” he snarls after my second try on the door, “no soap. Let’s hit the next one!”

“Hang on,” I yell back. “I hear something. Lemme try again.”

Louder this time. Rap rap rap rap!

Still no answer.

I turn and am making my way down the front walkway when the door swings open. A beefy guy in an open bathrobe is standing there, his dick hanging out. His hair is mussed. My intrusion has clearly interrupted his sleep.

We’re fifteen feet apart when I catch a glimpse of something gleaming in his hand behind the fold in his robe.

“One more step, punk, and you’ll never make the curb!”

The words stop me cold. “Hey,” I say, not sure how to play the guy, “looks like I woke you up. Sorry about that.”

“Drop the brown package on the ground, asshole. Right there.”

“Look,” I continue, “I just told you I was sorry. Let’s leave it there. I don’t want any trouble.”

“Do it, I said! Do it now!”

“No way!” I hear myself yell back. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”

Chuckles is coming up the walkway behind me to back me up.

Now I see what the guy’s hiding: a piece. A stainless-steel revolver, currently aimed at the sidewalk. “Hands in the air, punk!” he commands.

Chuckles freezes. “Look, mister,” he says, “you’ve got us wrong. My friend and I don’t want any trouble.”

“You! Shut up! Stand there next to your partner!”

With that the guy leans back inside. I can still see part of his robe and the side of his body but the front door is now only a few inches open.

“Chucky,” I say, “I’m outta here.”

He nods. “Right behind you.”

Picking up my demo packet I start down the walkway toward the street.

Captain Crazy swings the door open. There’s a telephone in his hand, and his robe is fastened. “Hold it, asshole! Hold it right there!”

He hangs up the phone. Instead of the revolver, now there’s a long metal flashlight in his hand.

He comes down the front steps in long strides. When he reaches me he grabs me by my shirt. I push his hand away.

He smashes my mouth with the thick end of the flashlight, breaking the glass.

Hands to my face, I watch blood drip from my mouth onto my shirt and tie. One of my teeth is chipped.

But the guy isn’t through. Using both hands, he jams me in the gut with the pole end of the light.

I’m down. Seconds later I’m puking up the beers I drank.

The guy in the robe turns out to be an off-duty LAPD cop. Neither Chuckles nor I knew a solicitor’s permit was a requirement to bang on a door in Westchester. None of our bosses had told us. But neither of us had been resisting arrest.

At the police station some higher-up cop in street clothes takes me into his office, tells me he’s sorry for the misunderstanding and the ass-kicking I received, and then gives me a song and dance about how two local guys matching our description have been committing robberies while impersonating door-to-door salesmen. Unfortunately, he says, Officer Goofshit overreacted when he smashed me in the face with his flashlight. He was only doing his job. Meanwhile Chuckie and I have to come up with the money to get the Bug out of the impound lot ten miles away.

Late that afternoon at the vacuum cleaner dealer’s warehouse in West L.A., after several beers on the ride over and with dried blood still on my shirt, I walk with Chuckles into the owner’s office. I ask the boss why the hell he’s sent us out without door-knocking papers, and I demand money from the company to pay for my ruined clothes and Charlie’s vehicle impound fees.

Jerry Decker, the owner, is large and fat and prone to pomposity and fits of sweating. He’s been a Kirby owner and dealer for fifteen years. According to Jerry, our “incident” is the first time one of his canvas people has been in any kind of physical altercation with a cop, permit or no permit. This, I am positive, is total crap.

Jerry lights a cigarette and rocks back in his chair. He straightens the wide silk tie that descends from his un-buttonable collar, then measures me and Chuckles.

“You boys been drinking on the job?”

“We bought a couple of beers on the way back,” I answer. “You would too. We’ve just spent three hours in the slam because your company didn’t spring for a canvassing permit and Chuckie’s Bug got towed. You might say we’ve had a lousy day.”

“Gentlemen, using alcohol while on assignment is a class-one infraction at this or any other Kirby dealer franchise. Grounds for termination.”

“Termination!” Chuckles yells. “You’re going to fire us?”

Now Jerry’s on his feet. Mr. Decker is a prosperous businessman, a calm professional, a credit to the Kirby organization. “Come back next Friday, on the fifteenth. See June in payroll. She’ll have your final checks then. You can leave your machines and sales demo kits in the stockroom. I’ll check them over and re-inventory the equipment myself.”

“Stick your Kirbys up your ass, Jerry,” I yell.

“You’re both intoxicated. I say good riddance to bad rubbish.”

Apparently Chuckles, who is drunker than me, is rendered speechless and/or no longer cares to respond.

“Kiss my ass, Jerry,” I say.

“No machines—no paychecks,” snarls Jerry.