Fante

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By late 1978, I was about to relocate from New York City back to Los Angeles, after fourteen years, to open the West Coast branch of Dav-Ko Limousine Service. David Kasten had chosen me to be his resident live-in manager and his 49 percent partner in California (with the remaining 51 percent held by himself). He apparently respected my work ethic. Kasten, of course, didn’t know I was an unrepentant drunk and in the process of losing my mind. Between the job offer and my father’s declining health, I talked myself into leaving New York City.

My existence for the past two years had been reduced to my job and a daily routine of late-night bar and home drinking. My days were spent sweating out an insane Purgatorio of hangovers that had gone on for too long. I had a brain that raced uncontrollably, giving me minute-by-minute bulletins of how I had ruined my life. I’d begun to consider my mind as something separate from me, a sort of newsroom delivering endless, poisonous indictments. Often I’d find myself talking back to it in public and find people staring at me. To calm myself down while working my daytime limo gig, I continued to write in my notebook as a hobby. Dark, angry stuff. Poetry, mostly, with occasional ranting letters to politicians.

Dav-Ko had added another half dozen stretch limousines and was conquering the limo world. Kasten’s family had now successfully paid his way through the minefield of legal and drug problems and, after weighing what was at stake for himself and his business, David had cleaned up his act.

Dav-Ko was now in its own garage on Fifty-second Street near Twelfth Avenue, next to a towing service. Kasten had hired his own in-house mechanic and had internal offices built, and there was floor space for twenty cars. At night, after work, I’d begun dating the dispatcher-bookkeeper from the towing company next door, Terri Rolla.

At the time Kasten formally offered me the partnership, I was unsure if I wanted it and told him I’d have to think it over. Leaving Manhattan did not appeal to me. My employer was selfish, preening, and egotistical, and very demanding as a boss. I liked David well enough but I didn’t like his friends or the way he talked to his employees, and I came to consider the prospect of him running my life over the phone from New York City as something potentially unpleasant. But that notion soon changed.

By now, as a chauffeur, I was making a side income by supplying a few of my rock-star customers with drugs. I sold coke by the gram as a convenience and made myself an extra few hundred dollars a week doing it.

Between my chauffeur income and my small drug sales, I had managed to stash a good chunk of cash under the floorboards of my planked living room: close to ten thousand dollars.

My main supplier of drugs was also a weekly limo client, a five-foot-tall racehorse trainer and bulk cocaine supplier named Pug Mahone, an immigrant from Ireland. He had once been a jockey but had lost his permit to ride as a result of accusations of having associations with known gamblers.

One day when I was picking up my package of dope at his apartment, Pug gave me a tip on a sure thing. The horse’s name was Itinerant Slim and his odds were going to be six-to-one at post time at “the Big A,” Aqueduct racetrack.

My drug-dealer client assured me that the race was a “lock” and that in his riding days he’d come to be pals with the jockey riding Slim that day. He’d even worked for the horse’s owners in the past. These guys had been saving Slim, holding him back, Pug said, for this specific race. A winning bet would net me 60K for my ten-thousand-dollar bet that Sunday.

I went for the idea. Screw David Kasten and Dav-Ko. I’d be able to buy my own limo. I already had two dozen steady high-end clients who always asked for me by name. In fact, I hated L.A. The brutal town was killing my father and I never wanted to go back. In a few days I might well be financially secure. Maybe I’d even quit drinking, go into a hospital, and stop burning my life down.

That Sunday Itinerant Slim got nosed out at the finish line by a spotted gray horse named Javelina’s Consent, who came from behind down the stretch to win it, having never before finished in the money.

When Pug eventually answered his phone a day later, he was high on his own powder. He whispered, “Dahnee boie, din’t I tell ya to bet the beast to Win and to Place? Din’t I now?”

“No,” I said, “you tweaking midget fuck. You didn’t. And you just put me out of business. You’re so cranked on that shit that you forget what the hell you say to people. I just lost ten grand. People get hurt for things like that, Pug.”

“Calm down, Dahnee. Ol’ Pug’ll put it right, straightaway. I bet him meself across the board. So you’re covered. You’ll get it back in product. Ya have me word on it.”

This I knew to be a dope dealer’s lie and for the rest of that day I considered my options. There was only one way to get my money back and that was to call the Bronx and pay a couple guys I knew to make a visit to Pug’s place. But rather than make that call, I decided to wait. There was an outside chance that Pug might make it good. I’d give it another twenty-four hours.

The next day, when I phoned his apartment again, I got no answer. I drove to his building in my limo on the way to a client pickup and gave the excuse to the doorman that I was there to drop off something for Mr. Mahone.

The guy shook his head. “Pug’s gone,” he whispered. “Three fellas came by early this morning. He left with them in a white gypsy cab.”

From the way the doorman guy said it, I could tell that something was wrong. By the end of the week, still not having heard from Pug, I was sure my 10K was gone for good.

People in the racing business sometimes disappear unaccountably, and the dismembered body of a small male was found several weeks later on the Jersey Shore. I assumed it was Pug but I never followed up.

I later learned from an Irish bartender that the name Pug Mahone was a fake, like everything else I thought I’d known about the ex-jockey. The term comes from the Irish phrase “pogue mahone.” In Gaelic it means “kiss my ass.”

With the loss of my savings, any misgivings I’d had about a partnership with David Kasten and the move to Los Angeles were gone. I was now also out of the cocaine business.

A couple days before Christmas, I left for California. Terri Rolla told me that she was in love with me. She was a small woman, five feet tall, twenty-two years old, with big brown eyes. Terri loved boozing and was happy to indulge all of my varied sexual requests. I’d had no thought whatever of continuing the hookup after my move to L.A.

The setup of Dav-Ko Hollywood went well. It took time to do the alterations of the duplex on Selma Avenue and hire and train a staff of six drivers.

The Dav-Ko West office (which doubled as my home) was near the freeway and close enough to the Beverly Hills hotels and the music-business offices of many of the clients we serviced. Unfortunately, our business could not have been deeper inside the moist crotch that was Hollywood in those days. Selma Avenue was home to teenage male hustlers who worked the street just outside our driveway.

With only three limos to our fleet, David and I needed to make backup arrangements with the other local services. We spent the first couple weeks (me driving him around) meeting other company owners to ensure that our overflow would be covered for weddings and concert work.

At the time, our company operated the only non-black fleet of stretch limousines in Los Angeles and New York. White, red, and brown. Our limos featured a stocked bar, telephone, and console TV. Our white limo had eight pounds of crushed pearl blended into its paint. Kasten named the car Pearl.

The novelty of having non-black stretch limos caught on quickly with our rock-star, doper, and entertainment customers. The drivers we hired and trained were all young and had never been chauffeurs before (most had never owned a suit). Dav-Ko had broken the stodgy limo-services mold in Los Angeles and our business began to take off.

Within a couple months each of our cars was busy fifteen to twenty hours a day. Riding the wave, Kasten, now back in New York, immediately ordered three more Lincolns to be stretched in Mexico and shipped north to Los Angeles.

On the phone with him from my live-in office in one of our twice-weekly, nitpicky strategy meetings, Kasten suggested that I invite Terri Rolla to move from the Manhattan towing service to Los Angeles to become our resident live-in day-dispatcher. He knew I’d dated Terri, and angle-shooter that he was, David was ever on the lookout to save a buck by getting discount labor.

I didn’t like the idea. I’d kept in touch with Terri because she phoned all the time. She’d wanted more of a permanent relationship, but I’d sensed potential problems and put her off. Terri was not my girlfriend. We partied. We screwed and drank and did dope together. Period.

A few days went by and Kasten kept pushing me. I’d already hired a part-time night guy to cover my evenings out—hooker-hunting on the company’s dime—and my boss was annoyed over the added expense and suspicious when I refused to come to the phone. In the end I had to give in.

The upside of having Terri in Hollywood was that she was a skilled bookkeeper and had experience as an effective radio dispatcher. And, as I soon found out, our L.A. clients enjoyed talking to a young girl with a Bronx accent. Terri was spunky—cute and never without a quick comeback. What I didn’t know was that she was developing a serious amphetamine jonz.

Within a few months of my girlfriend being in Los Angeles, the two of us were at war.

Because of the nature of the limo business in L.A., several of my customers paid in cash—pimps and dope dealers, mostly. There was now plenty of spending-green changing hands. I made it my business to be gone at night four or five evenings a week, boozing, making the rounds. Terri, alone at the office and stuck at a phone, was left to troubleshoot problem calls from whacked-out movie stars and music-business hotshots who complained over everything from the car phone not dialing properly to the color of the limo to not having enough free Scotch in the stocked bar. This went on every night. Terri’s answer to sleeplessness was a pill called a black beauty.

In the morning, when we did the books for the previous night, Terri and I would split up the cash. She always got thirty percent. I got the rest. David Kasten condoned this practice in lieu of having to shell out higher salaries. The cash income was gravy.

One of our clients, a thug and doper musician named Buddy Smiles, was in the habit of renting two limos for his local performances. Buddy was a cash client, and it was my strict policy to have the chauffeur get the money up front at the pickup location.

On his first booking with Dav-Ko, Buddy, who did not have a good rep with other limo companies, jived and shucked and attempted to put off payment until, he said, he could get back to his hotel room. Over the two-way radio I told my two drivers to leave him and his instruments and his band at the front door of the club. “Pickup canceled,” I said over the two-way radio. “Just pull away. Get out of there.”

Standing next to the car, Buddy heard my radio orders and quickly came up with a roll of hundred-dollar bills. He and his manager, Champ, I later learned, both carried guns.

My business relationship with Buddy further deteriorated.

With the parking problems at smaller club venues in Hollywood, it was often tough to have the limos waiting at the entrance door at the end of a performance. The last time we ever furnished cars for Buddy and his band, he called our office after the gig and began ranting at Terri. His up-front cash deposit had expired and she’d demanded more money.

Buddy was half-drunk, dusted, and furious that the limos were not in front of the club while he and his band sat backstage after the gig smoking dust and getting drunk.

It was two a.m. My drivers had already loaded the band’s instruments into the trunks of our limos and were waiting in a parking lot down the street from the club.

Buddy, a nice-enough cat while straight, was off the deep end. He threatened Terri and said he would smash out the windows of our cars if they were not in front of the club in one minute.

“Danny, come heah,” she yelled to me in the bedroom across the hall. “Dis muthafucka’s whacked-out. You gotta deal with him.”

Taking the phone from her, I put the call on hold, then radioed the two cars, telling them both to pull away and return to our garage with Buddy’s equipment still in their trunk.

“This is Dan, Buddy. I’m the owner. What the hell’s going on?”

Buddy was not up for a reasonable conversation. “I want them cars in front of the club now,” he snarled. “Get ’em back here or I’ll be over there in ten minutes and shove my .45 up your ass. You juss fucked with the wrong nigga!”

If anyone, an angry client or an exhausted driver, threatened me or gave me trouble, my reaction was to instantly up the ante. “Try me, you piece of shit,” I yelled. “I’m here. I’ve got my own iron. I’m waiting. No money—no limos. Fuck you, Buddy!”

I hung up.

For the next two hours, I sat in one of the drivers’ dark parked cars across the street from our building on Selma Avenue, my sawed-off on the floor and a loaded .357 in my hand. Buddy never showed up.

The next day Champ arrived with a fistful of cash. He said Buddy was sorry. He’d had a bad night. That was the end for Buddy and Dav-Ko.

My real trouble with Terri began when she discovered that I was doing trade-offs for payment with one of my clients, a Hollywood escort pimp who called himself David Davis.

Davis ran a stable of high-priced girls from a penthouse in an apartment building behind Hollywood Boulevard. The Franklin Tower Apartments. I had developed a friendship with the pimp because he liked our cars and because our license plates had the words “Dav-Ko,” followed by the number, on each car. He’d started telling all his high-end Hollywood friends that he was a partner in the company.

Soon I was at his place regularly. For a pimp, Davis was not the normal hard-assed hustler. Money and recognition were his priority. He saw himself retiring at forty and returning to New Orleans to open a restaurant.

Our clienteles were similar, but unlike me and my customers, Davis refused to have anything to do with dealing drugs himself. He did keep a one-ounce stash of coke and a jar of Quaaludes on hand for in-house parties.

He had five very pretty girls who would do anything if the price was right. His best girl, looks-wise, was a stunning twenty-year-old Asian runaway from Chicago. Davis called her Chink. I had never had sex with a girl of her beauty before and from that night on I became a regular client.

The first time I met Chink, Davis and I were drinking bourbon at his place. Davis had just called all the girls out to greet his new trade-off partner. One service for another. Chink was tall for a Korean girl, with a great smile, and her hair was cut almost as short as a boy’s. When Davis saw that I had my eye on her, he dismissed the others.

Chink stood alone in the living room wearing a short skirt and a bra-less halter top. Davis told her that she was to take special care of me.

He motioned with his glass for her to get us a drink, and she went to the bar. When she returned with our glasses, Davis whispered to her, “Take your clothes off, angel.”

They fell to the floor.

“You like cock, don’t you, Chink?” he whispered.

“That’s right,” she smiled. “I like cock.”

“Not just mine, right? You like all cocks.”

“I’m into guys. You know I like guys, D.”

“Turn around and show Danny boy here what you’ve got.”

Chink smiled and did as instructed.

“If I wanted to hammer that beautiful ass right now, tell me what you’d say.”

She turned toward us and whispered, “You know what I’d say, D.”

Davis stood up and came around the coffee table to where Chink was standing. “Now,” he whispered to me, “my best bitch will show you what she likes me to do.”

With that he opened a drawer and removed a tube of jelly. He covered his fingers with the lubricant and then began to insert them one at a time into Chink’s pussy. When three fingers were inside her, he paused; then he began to work them in and out as she smiled and moaned.

Finally, he turned her around, dropped his pants, and stuck his cock in her mouth.

As she was on her knees performing the blow job, he turned toward me. “Whatever you like, Danny boy. No limits for my friends. Satisfaction guaranteed.”

My late-night visits and scenes with Chink went on for a month. Her body was amazing and our sex was crazy and wonderful. What we had in common was whiskey and the pure enjoyment of each other. Chink’s favorite trick while we drank and screwed was to squirt half a gram of coke, diluted in water, up my ass using a turkey baster. Then do it to herself. The rush was mind-blowing.

Late one afternoon one of Davis’s girls called Dav-Ko and ordered a car for him, breaking our deal with each other. My instructions to Davis had been to never book a car with anyone but me.

I’d been out of the office and couldn’t take the call, and later found out that one of his girls had been arrested in a Hollywood raid and was in jail downtown at Sybil Brand.

When Terri Rolla took the booking order, she’d asked about payment arrangements and the girl on the phone told her to speak to me. Smelling a rat, Terri checked our dispatch log for the past couple weeks. I’d faked several names and entered the word “complimentary” in the booking log but left the same pickup address for the client. The jig was up.

That night when I arrived home, my girlfriend, who had retaliated by raiding the hiding place where I kept my money, was wearing an expensive gold chain with a diamond pendant hanging from it. I was drunk and furious.

In the argument that followed, Terri picked up a thick wooden cane that had been left in a limo by one of our clients, and began smashing lamps and furniture. When I tried stopping her, she began swinging the thing at me. I was clipped in the head and shoulders and then, while I covered up, she slammed the wooden cane into my ribs.

Standing over me, she was spitting and screaming. “Here’s a promise, mothafucka; if I catch ya with one of Davis’s bitches again, hookas ah whateva, you’ll come to one mornin’ with blood on ya cheets instead of piss kauz ya cock and balls will be in tha dumpsta out back.” Then she mimed a knife-slashing motion with her hands. “I dare ya to try me, ya juicehead prick. Ya fuck with me and ya pay with ya dick.”

For the next week I had a large cane-shaped purple bruise across my rib cage. Terri made it her business to take over all the day-dispatching and the books, and stopped talking to me. She began to spend a lot of time on the phone with her girlfriend Ginger, a Bronx psychic and astrologer, and also began having occasional personal conversations with David Kasten.

To make peace I offered to move us and the business into a new luxury building on Hillside Avenue a few blocks away. One of our customers had just built it and offered to wave the security deposit for the first tenant and give us ten parking spots in the downstairs parking garage. We had outgrown the Selma Avenue location and were now operating seven limos full-time, bringing in over ten grand a week, so even David Kasten supported the move.

For the first couple months, the move worked. Terri Rolla loved stuff, glitz, and we were back in the sack again. She was still eating black beauties like M&Ms, but when she drank with me at night her disposition improved in direct proportion to her alcohol consumption.

The new place was nice. Swanky. I’d rented four rooms of new furniture and three color TVs. Terri also wanted a dog, so I got her one—a terrier mutt I named Banana who came to hate me and later bit me on the leg.

Terri, ever the Bronx status mooch, decided that our bedroom should be mirrored, walls and ceiling, so I hired a guy and paid two grand in cash for that too.

Because I was blacking out a lot and now frequently driving drunk, Terri was afraid I’d get a DUI and go to jail, and we would lose the business to David Kasten. To counter her fears, at night, after several drinks, I began to train for the police field sobriety test. I did this for a month, and in the end it got so that no matter what condition of drunkenness I was in, I could always touch my nose with either index finger with my eyes closed, and I could also walk the fifteen-foot straight line that I’d manufacture out of toilet paper on our hallway carpet.

At work the problem was me. I was drinking pretty much nonstop, shitting or pissing our bed at least twice a week. Blacking out. While running the company during the day, I was unable to control my temper with Terri and sometimes yelled at our customers on the phone.

In an effort to battle my toxic hangovers, I snorted coke with my coffee in the morning, backed up by a half pint of vodka and several gulps of Pepto-Bismol.

One afternoon, without much provocation, I told off a client on the phone, then went outside and fired the two drivers who had driven the guy and his friends the night before.

Terri intervened. She threatened to walk out and leave the company if I didn’t rehire the drivers.

Things got worse. My girlfriend’s pressure and nagging for me to clean up were constant, and with the growing success of the business, I was becoming more out of control. I lived in fear that David Kasten would find out about me any day and the whole thing would fall apart.

In an effort to make the situation better, I hired an in-house overnight limo dispatcher. Our office (formerly the master bedroom of the apartment), though large, was a constant zoo of frustrated drivers and emergency, troubleshooting hysteria. Peter Holloway was a fifty-year-old ex–daytime TV soap opera actor with a soothing British accent and an excellent phone manner. He became our ten p.m. to eight a.m. overnight guy.

Twice in our first few months at the Hillside Avenue top-floor apartment, I had smashed into our closed sliding-glass balcony door and broken the thing. The third time I’d cut a deep gash into the side of my head.

I’d become a jerk and a mean-tempered sonofabitch to those around me. I didn’t care. I now carried my gun full-time. After two fights on the streets of Hollywood resulting from road rage—mine and someone else’s—I also began carrying a sawed-off baseball bat under the front seat, a remnant from my cabbie days in the Bronx, where I had picked up the nickname Batman from the other drivers.

One night four of my cars were due to return from a wedding in Palos Verdes. When the limos arrived back at the garage entrance, its automatic gate was blocked by a rented moving truck. It was Peter’s night off, so I had to get out of bed, get dressed, and go downstairs to deal with the problem.

I told the drivers to park their limos two blocks away in a church parking lot and followed them there in one of the drivers’ cars. When we returned a quarter of an hour later, the truck was still there.

After the drivers had gone home, I drank another tall glass of whiskey. Something had suddenly shifted. The booze-filled rage that came on was a kind of brownout—I knew what I was doing but could not stop myself.

Entering the penthouse, I got my shotgun from the bedroom closet. Terri, watching TV from our canopy bed, looked on as I loaded it.

I went back down to the garage and fired off two blasts. One blew out the windshield of the truck and the other exploded one of its tires.

I hid my shotgun in the weeds of a vacant lot, then walked down to a Denny’s on Hollywood Boulevard and had breakfast.

When I got back to the apartment, Terri was nuts: naked, afraid, shaking, and chain-smoking. The cops had come. They’d knocked on residents’ doors (not ours). Fortunately, no one had witnessed the incident. My girlfriend threatened to call David Kasten and the police and have me bagged as a 51-50 (a danger to myself and others), then demanded I get some kind of immediate treatment for my behavior and insanity.

That afternoon she had one of her friends pick up my guns, drive to Venice Pier, and throw them into the ocean.

I was in real trouble and I knew it. I had to agree to do something. To get help.

Before trying any kind of therapy, I convinced Terri that what I really needed was to detox myself. To sober up on my own.

We had all the Los Angeles phone books in our office, and I wanted to find a safe place far away from Hollywood where no one would bother me. I chose the Santa Monica Yellow Pages directory and began flipping pages. I soon found the name of a motel that sounded okay and dialed the number to book a room. The place was on Lincoln Boulevard.

I threw some stuff into Terri’s small suitcase, then had one of our drivers drop me off three blocks from the L.A. Vista Motel. I paid the clerk for a week up front in cash.

Once inside room #18 I unplugged the TV and closed the blinds.

I took off my clothes down to my T-shirt and underwear, gulped as much water as I could, and then began walking the floor.

By sundown, having not slept more than a couple hours in the past twenty-four, I was exhausted and lay down. But my eyes would not stay closed. I wound up pacing the room some more, soaked in sweat, beginning to shake badly.

I’d given the name of the motel to Terri, and when the phone rang after midnight and I answered, she wanted to know how I was doing. I hung up and unplugged the thing after threatening I’d go to the liquor store if she didn’t leave me alone.