West of Rome Read online

  West of Rome

  John Fante

  Table of Contents

  My Dog Stupid

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The Orgy

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  About the Author

  Other Books by John Fante

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  My Dog Stupid

  ONE

  It was January, cold and dark and raining, and I was tired and wretched, and my windshield wipers weren’t working, and I was hung over from a long evening of drinking and talking with a millionaire director who wanted me to write a film about the Tate Murders “in the manner of Bonnie and Clyde, with wit and style.” There was no money involved. “We’ll be partners, fifty-fifty.” It was the third offer of that kind I’d had in six months, a very discouraging sign of the times.

  Crawling along the Coast Highway at fifteen miles an hour, my head out the window, my face dripping rain, my eyes straining to follow the white line, the vinyl top of my 1967 Porsche (four payments overdue, the finance company hollering) was almost ripped off by the driving torrent as I finally made the turn off the highway toward the ocean.

  We lived on Point Dume, a thrust of land jutting into the sea like a tit in a porno movie, the northern tip of the crescent that forms Santa Monica Bay. Point Dume is a community without street lights, a chaotic suburban sprawl so intricately bisected by winding streets and dead end roads that after twenty years of living out there I still got lost in fog or rain, often wandering aimlessly over streets not two blocks from my house.

  And as I knew I must that stormy night, I turned off on Bonsall instead of Fernhill and began the slow, hopeless business of trying to find my house, knowing that eventually, provided I didn’t run out of gas, I would circle back to the Coast Highway and the bleak light of the telephone booth at the bus stop, where I could phone Harriet to come and show me the way home.

  In ten minutes she appeared over the hill, the headlights of the station wagon spearing holes in the storm and zooming in on me parked beside the phone booth. She gave the horn a blast, leaped from the car and ran toward me in a white raincoat. Her eyes were wide with concern.

  “You’re going to need this.”

  She whipped my .22 pistol from under her coat and thrust it through the window. “There’s something terrible in the yard.”

  “What?”

  “God knows.”

  I didn’t want the damned gun. I wouldn’t take it. She stomped her foot.

  “Take it, Henry! It may save your life.”

  She shoved it right under my nose.

  “What the hell is it?”

  “I think it’s a bear.”

  “Where?”

  “On the lawn. Under the kitchen window.”

  “Maybe it’s one of the kids.”

  “With fur?”

  “What kind of fur?”

  “Bear fur.”

  “Maybe it’s dead.”

  “It’s breathing.”

  I tried to press the gun back to her. “Listen, I sure as hell don’t intend to shoot a sleeping bear with a .22! It’ll just wake him up. I’ll call the sheriff.”

  I opened the door but she pushed it closed.

  “No. Look at it first. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s just a burro.”

  “Oh, shit. Now it’s a burro. Does it have big ears?”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  I sighed and started the car. She ran back to the station wagon and wheeled it onto the road. There was no white center line, so I stayed close to her tail lights as the car rolled slowly through cascades of rain.

  Our house was on an acre of ground a hundred yards from the cliff and the roaring ocean below. It was a Y-shaped so-called rancho inside a concrete wall that completely circled the acre. A hundred and fifty tall pines grew along the walls so that it was like living in a forest, and the entire layout looked exactly like what it was not—the domicile of a successful writer.

  But it was paid for, right down to the last sprinkler head, and I had an overwhelming passion to dump it and get out of the country. Over my dead body, Harriet always challenged, and I often amused myself with wistful reveries of her lying in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor as I dug a grave out by the corral, then grabbing an Al Italia for Rome with seventy thousand bucks in my jeans and a new life on the Piazza Navonne, with a brunette for a change.

  But she was very good, my Harriet, she had stuck it out with me for twenty-five years and given me three sons and a daughter, any one of whom, or indeed all four, I would have gladly exchanged for a new Porsche, or even an MG GT '70.

  TWO

  Harriet made the turn into the driveway and I drew up beside her in the garage. We were surprised to find the other car there, a 1940 Packard, a real antique belonging to Dominic, our oldest, the family’s prime screwball. We had not seen him in two weeks. His return on such a stormy night meant that he was either in trouble or out of clean shirts. I opened the Packard’s rear door. The interior reeked of pot. Harriet reached inside and made a face as she picked up a pair of blue panties. With an ugh she tossed them back.

  We stepped out of the garage. The house bloomed like a used car lot, a light in every window, and spotlights over the back door and the garage, flooding the lawn with a bleak iridescence in the rain.

  “It’s still there,” Harriet hesitated, looking toward the back door. Then I saw it, a dark piled-up mass, motionless and tumbled like a rug. I told her to stay calm.

  “The gun.”

  “I left it in the car.”

  She went back for it and put it in my hand.

  “Relax, for God’s sake,” I said.

  It was fifty feet from the garage to the back door, the passage protected from rain by the eaves of a low roof projecting like a porch. Harriet took a firm grip on my coat-tail and, gun at the ready, I tiptoed forward, scared, eyeballs straining to focus on the thing obscured in the rain.

  Gradually my vision printed an image. It was a sheep lying there. I could not see the head but the wooly rump and belly were plainly visible. All at once the swirling wind changed the course of the rain and the shape altered. I caught my breath. That was no sheep. It even had a mane.

  “It’s a lion,” I said, backing off.

  But she had flawless eyesight.

  “It’s nothing of the sort.” All fear drained from her voice. “It’s just a dog.” She moved forward confidently.

  A dog it was, a very large dog, heavy coated, brown and black, with a massive head, and a short stumpy black nose, a mournful beast with the somber face of a bear. But for the measured pumping of his great chest one would have guessed that he was dead, for his slanted eyes were closed. There was an almost imperceptible flap to his black lips as he breathed in and out. He was obviously unconscious, the rain battering him hard.

  While I tried to speak to him Harriet dashed into the house and returned with an umbrella. We got beneath it and bent over the beast. She stroked his wet nose.

>   “Poor thing. I wonder what’s wrong with him?”

  I fondled his thick, tough, black ears.

  “This is a very sick dog,” I said, my fingers coming upon a tick the size of a bean, so bloated that it rolled in my palm like a marble. I flipped it away.”

  “What’s he doing here?”

  “This dog is a bum,” I said. “A socially irresponsible animal, a runaway.”

  “He’s just plain sick.”

  “He’s not sick. He’s too lazy to find shelter.” I poked him with my toe. “On your way, you bum.” But he didn’t move or open his eyes.

  “Oh, my God!” Harriet gasped, backing away and pulling me with her. “Don’t touch him. Maybe he’s got rabies!”

  That cooled me. I wanted no part of a rabid dog. We hurried inside and locked the door. I was soaked, dripping on the kitchen floor. While I stripped off my wet clothes Harriet went back to the bedroom for my robe. She brought it out and bourbon and ice and we sat at the table and pondered the problem.

  “We can’t just leave him out there,” she said. “He’ll die.”

  “Death comes to us all,” I said, finishing my second drink.

  She lost patience.

  “Do something. Call somebody. Find out what to do with a rabid dog.”

  The stove clock showed nine-thirty as I dialed Lam-son, the Malibu vet. Sleazy and corrupt, dog doctor to the stars, Lamson was like the tick I had removed from the dog’s ear, having feasted on my blood for years, his helpless victim, for he ran the only dog hospital north of Santa Monica.

  His housekeeper answered. Dr. and Mrs. Lamson were not at home. They were on their yacht at Catalina. I hung up, my lips shaping a small invocation to San Gennaro, the patron saint of Naples, imploring him to sink the Lamsons and their yacht to the bottom of the sea.

  Next I called the Sheriff’s office, knowing exactly what the desk sergeant would say, and he said it: call the County Animal Shelter. A sense of hopelessness came over me as I dialed the Animal Shelter number. I knew it would be a recording, and it was. They were closed until nine the following morning.

  The pounding rain eased to a whisper, then stopped. Harriet looked out the window at the dog.

  “I think he’s dead.”

  Pleased with the quiet after the rain, I sipped on another drink. From the north wing of my Y-shaped house came the whang of a stereo in Dominic’s room, the mindless rhythms of the Mothers of Invention. I had come to hate the unspeakable illiteracy of that sound, and I lifted my eyes to San Gennaro, and I said to him, how long, O Gennaro, must I suffer? All the way back to Presley and Fats Domino, yea even Ike and Tina Turner, then the eternity of the Beatles and the Grateful Dead, the Monkees, Simon and Garfunkel, the Doors, the Rotary Connection, all, all have polluted the inside of my house, all that fucking barbarism flooding my home year after year, and now the son-of-a-bitch was twenty-four years old, and still a pain in the ass.

  Remember, O Gennaro, how he totaled my T-Bird? And hast thou forgotten the wreckage of my Avanti? Nor let us forget that he was once busted for smoking pot and that it cost me fifteen hundred and they still convicted him, and that he sleepeth ever and anon with black women, which tries his mother sorely, and there cometh over me constantly this uneasy suspicion that he is a nance. Damn him, O blessed saint. And if destiny decides that a rabid dog bite one of this family, let it bite him! Harriet jumped when I slammed the table with my fist.

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Your son Dominic!” I speared her with a finger. “He’s going out there and do something about that dog!”

  I took one more drink and marched down the hall to Dominic’s door and batted it with the butt of my fist. The stereo went silent.

  “Who is it?”

  “Your Father. Henry J. Molise.”

  He unlocked the door and stood there in his shorts, a massive young man with heavy shoulders and legs.

  “Hi, Dad. What’s up?”

  I walked into the room.

  “Where you been the last two weeks?”

  “Around.”

  He was freshly shaven, smelling of lime, his hair carefully combed, long and covering his ears. I sat on the bed as he slipped into a pair of wide-striped slacks. An extremely unpredictable cat, he had abandoned college for a tour in the navy. Now he was a machinist, earning ten thousand a year, insufficient for his needs even though he spent it all on himself and from time to time borrowed from his parents. The only clue to his heavy expenses were random poker chips from the Gardena card parlors which Harriet dug out of his pockets when she did his laundry. I noticed a couple of these along with coins and car keys on the bedside table. There was also a packet of condoms.

  “Can’t you be more circumspect?” I said, nodding at the condoms. “Your mother and sister live here too.”

  He smiled. “I can show you a whole bottle of birth control pills in your daughter’s bathroom.”

  A new picture hung from the wall above the bookcase, barely visible above the lamplight. I tilted the lampshade and flooded the picture with light. It was the blowup of a naked black girl wearing a blonde wig, seated with wide-spread legs on a bar stool.

  “Where’d you get that?”

  “You like it?”

  “Doesn’t do a thing to me. Has your mother seen it?”

  “I just hung it up.”

  “What do you want from your mother—a cardiac arrest?”

  “It’s just plain, wholesome pornography. There’s lots of it under the bed, and she’s seen it all. Help yourself anytime.”

  I had already examined the material. “No thanks, I’m reading Camus at the moment.”

  “Camus? Outstanding.”

  I sized him up for a moment.

  “What the hell have you got against white women?”

  He turned and smiled as he buttoned his shirt.

  “Some people like white meat, and some people like dark. What’s the difference…it’s all turkey.”

  “Don’t you have any race pride?”

  “Race pride! Say, that’s a hell of a phrase, Dad. I’ll bet you dreamed it up yourself. It’s uncanny. No wonder you’re such a great writer.” He crossed to the desk and picked up a pencil and wrote on an envelope. “ ‘Race pride.’ I want to write that down so I won’t forget it.”

  What a creep! No dialogue was possible with him, for he put the blocks to me every time. I could have pointed out that the flesh on his bones came from sweating out my miserable screenplays, and that the orthodontist’s tab for his flawless teeth had come to three grand, to say nothing of the thousands he had cost me in wrecked cars, motorcycles, surfboards and high insurance premiums. But he would have pounced on all that as self-pity, which, of course, it was. Life was so unfair. As your sons got bigger, you got smaller, and you couldn’t even belt them anymore. The last time I had whacked this kid was three years ago when I found him drunk in a parked car. It threw him into hysterical laughter.

  I shifted the conversation to the strange dog in the yard, and his eyes leaped with interest for he loved dogs and had once owned a champion beagle. Joining Harriet in the kitchen, we trooped out into the back yard.

  The storm had subsided and the washed blue sky was speckled with stars. The dog lay as we had left him. We crowded around him and heard the soft deep rhythm of his breathing. Shrugging off Harriet’s warning about rabies, Dominic dropped to his haunches and stroked the broad, saturnine head. I had never seen a sadder, more disconsolate dog.

  “He’s exhausted,” Dominic said. “Listen to him snore.”

  “He looks heart-broken,” Harriet said. “I wonder if he’s been mistreated.”

  “Nobody mistreats a monster like this,” Dominic said. He rubbed the coarse black and brown pelt, so thick it had shed the rain and was now dry and glossy. The gloomy head lay limp and dispirited.

  “That’s a very sick dog,” I decided.

  “You should be so sick,” Dominic said. “Look what’s happening.”

&
nbsp; The beast was developing a hard-on. Emerging from its hairy sheath his joint oozed out to form a gigantic Salinas Valley carrot as it tested the night air, the slitted single eye panning around. As if in response the dog slowly lifted his head and glanced down at the newcomer. He seemed pleased and arched his great neck to give it a couple of affectionate swipes with his tongue. They were obviously devoted friends.

  “Disgusting,” Harriet said.

  There was a metallic sound as the neck strained forward. Probing the fur, Dominic’s fingers found a choke chain collar with a dog tag attached.

  “Good,” I said. “That should tell us the owner.”

  Since it was too dark to read the tag, Dominic removed the chain from the dog’s neck. He held the metal tag to the light, read it without comment, then passed it to Harriet and me. Stamped upon the tag was an inscription.

  It read: “You’ll be sorry.”

  “Stan Jackson!” I said.

  Jackson was a writer down the coast who thought up gimmicks for afternoon television shows as well as his friends. The tag was his style. It had to be his dog too. Harriet pointed out that the Jacksons were out of the country.

  “Besides,” she said. “I think ‘You’ll be sorry’ is his real name.” She bent over the animal and tried it out: “Hello there, You’ll Be Sorry. How are you?”

  Preoccupied with his joint, the dog paid her no mind. Dominic replaced the collar. He had a good suggestion: not to fuss over the dog, to leave him alone and permit him to move on when he chose.

  The dog lumbered to his feet, holstered his shooter, and yawned. Standing erect he seemed even larger, with a bushy plumed tail that curled over his back and webbed paws the size of a man’s fists. I guessed his weight at around a hundred and twenty pounds.

  Harriet thought he was an Eskimo dog.

  “A malamute,” Dominic said.

  To me he looked just plain formidable, a gloomy troubled beast with slanted black eyes and the face of a bear, more like a massive chow than anything else. We stared in surprise as he strolled to the porch steps and calmly entered the house.

  “I don’t want him in there,” Harriet said.

  I turned to Dominic.