Remembering John Fante

By: A collection of essays written by the Fante family | Photography from the Fante Estate | August 05, 2009 | Non Fiction

On his first weekend morning in the Malibu sun, he was strolling up Cliffside Drive with his wife and children — and his dogs, which were not on leashes. When they arrived in front of Godzilla’s lair, a quarter mile from home, a white, bullet-headed bull terrier appeared.  Rocco had scrambled through his newest undetected escape route.

My old man’s puppy set upon both the hundred-pound Dobies simultaneously. During the interlude, along with an appropriate amount of bloodshed, anguished screaming could be heard.

Alerted to the commotion I ran toward our wall, boosted myself up, then watched helplessly from 50 feet away.

These Dobermans, Hans and Fritz or Martin and Lewis — or whatever they were called — as I’ve said, were would-be show dogs. But even the two of them were no match for Rocco.

While one of the animals gnawed on him, defending his sidekick, my papa’s pet bull terrier crushed the other one’s front leg. More blood flowed. It was not Rocco’s. His thick white head and body were eventually covered with it.

With the first Dobie sufficiently disabled and mutilated, Rocco set upon his brother. Dobie number two, luckily for him, was a fast runner.

He’d calculated his odds, understood the situation and hauled ass.

My father was not a rich man, but his new neighbor was. Papers were filed and court appearances scheduled. Months passed while Rocco continued to maim more dogs. But Pop refused to yield. In the end, after several unpleasant conversations featuring my old man’s invective and repeated verbal beheadings, the whole deal went to court.

Luckily for our family, the broker guy was basically a decent sort. As both neighbors, with their attorneys, stood on the steps of the Santa Monica Court House, the issue was settled without a gavel.

Our neighbor’s lawyer had rightly explained to him his own carelessness in not leashing his future champions. The fellow was willing to settle. Pop would pay his vet bill augmented by a few hundred bucks for destroying the animal’s show potential. But unhappily, Rocco’s reputation and history of mayhem had to be factored in or the deal was off. My father was made to agree to “put down” his dog.

One afternoon a few weeks later Pop gathered us kids together outside in our carport. We were told that Rocco was going to a new home as our father prepared to load him into our station wagon — a two-year-old Plymouth that, when purchased secondhand, had frame damage and was badly in need of a wheel alignment.

The picture my father described was more alluring than the 4,000 years in purgatory Rocco deserved and the lethal injection he actually received. Pop said our doggie would go to a spacious ranch in the country above Santa Barbara where the owners loved bull terriers. He would be able to play with other dogs and play to his heart’s content. Done deal.

Then Rocco’s absence triggered a curious reaction from the owner of Rancho Fante. I assume he was trying to make himself feel better and less responsible. My father began to acquire more dogs. Over the next few years we had as many as 10 at one time roaming the property. They were mutts mostly but also an Akita and a half Pitty and a crazy Shepherd named Willie (after my Dad’s pal William Saroyan).

John Fante made dinner for these yappers every night — a foul concoction of dog meal and leftovers in a beef broth base. The old man soon prided himself on his relationship with our local Safeway supermarket meat manager named Don, who set aside stacks of special bones for his twice-a-week Point Dume customer.

Walled-in Rancho Fante was a great home for these docile puppies. They played and dozed in the afternoon sun all their lives with my old man assuming the role of contented patron. John Fante now had a devoted clan, beings he could happily relate to.

 
At 12 years old, at the beginning of the surfer craze that ultimately inflicted stupidity on most of the world, I got my first paying gig and became a bait barge assistant a mile out in the ocean off Paradise Cove Pier. Our careers at flopping live anchovies into fishing boat bait tanks ended in mid-summer when the pier manager got word from one of his customers that we were both out there drunk.

After that, I became a failed dishwasher at The Coral Beach Cantina, then a gas pump jockey at Wiley’s 76 across the parking lot. Eventually, I graduated with no distinction other than partial attendance, from Saint Monica’s Boys Catholic High School in 1962. At that time I had only one serious arrest to my name.

In the mid-’60s, I moved to New York City and became a cab driver, a conscientious objector and a booze-sucking nut job. I found myself arrested on many more occasions resulting from a long series of bad breaks and misunderstandings. 

The years passed. Then, by the late ’80s, I’d done enough substance research and celebrating, had further legal consequences and was more or less homeless. In 1991, returning to my parents’ house was my best good idea.

Old ghosts now filled the big, empty bedrooms on Cliffside Drive. My dad and my brothers and sister were gone. My siblings had all married and had their own families, but my sister Vickie stayed in Malibu and bought a house above the old Getty Museum where she lives today.

Eight years before, diabetes had killed my father at the age of 74.

In his mid-70s, as complications from the disease worsened, amputations were necessary. Then glaucoma took his sight.

Toward the end of his life, I made weekly visits with my father at The Motion Picture Hospital. I always entered his room with a cup of coffee for him in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other.

He knew my footsteps and would smile and say, “Hi Danny. Got a smoke?”

I’d stick the cigarette into his mouth and put the coffee cup in his hand. “Howya doin’, Pop,” I’d ask.

“Ah, you know, kid, some days are good and some days … well, some days, it’s all I can do not to burn the joint down. I guess you could say I’m breaking even. Life’s a poosh.” On May 8 of 1983, I was sitting with him, alone in his hospital room, holding his hand when he died. We had become good friends after a rocky 30-year start.

Two novels that John Fante had written only a few years before his illness became critical were receiving national acclaim. And blind and legless, he’d dictated his last book, word for word, to my mother who wrote it all down in longhand while they sat in the sun on our back patio.

But it was 1991 now. My father was dead and had become a famous author. The books he’d stubbornly written during the last 20 years of his life, that no publisher would even consider, were selling tens of thousands of copies every year. A man, who for four decades had paid for the good life with his bad temper and self-rage — who rewrote mostly B-film scripts and sold his talent to the highest bidder, was now an established force in 20th century literature. Such is fame.

Arriving back at my parents’ Point Dume home that day, I had no car. A friend of mine gave me a ride from Santa Monica. I tugged three plastic garbage bags filled with all that I owned up the front walkway.

My mother’s greeting wasn’t joyous. She was now the matriarch of Rancho Fante and was intimately familiar with her new, ne’er-do-well roommate’s history. But for me and my life, such as it was, her home was the last house on the block.

Continuing our family tradition, my mom owned too many cars. At breakfast the next morning, she tossed me the keys to one of them — a six-year-old Chrysler. The clunker hadn’t been driven in months and apparently had become a seven-cylinder Chrysler.

Because I was broke and jobless, I usually walked the half-mile to my noon 12-step meetings at the community center on Fernhill.

One afternoon, with nothing to do but read or walk the beach, rehashing my history of particularly dumb personal choices, I began rummaging through the family garage. It was there that I located my father’s dusty old Smith Corona portable typewriter. Near it on the shelf, in a torn brown bag, was half a ream of yellow typing paper. I remembered seeing the paper before. My father, while he still had his sight, had written his last manuscript on this same paper. I took it and the typewriter inside to my room.

The next day, after my meeting at the community center, sitting in front of the machine, I wrote the sentence my father had always written whenever he was testing a typewriter for the first time. The line had its origins from the middle of the Depression when John Fante was 20 years old and living in Long Beach. A quarter of all Americans were jobless and struggling to feed their families. Many joined labor unions, guilds and political groups. Here is the sentence my father always wrote when he tested a typewriter for the first time: Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party.

I wrote the sentence perhaps 20 times while getting used to Pop’s machine. Then an idea to write another kind of sentence occurred to me. So I wrote that, too.

Then I wrote a few more sentences that weren’t particularly brilliant and continued on down the page until I got to the bottom.

I took the paper out of the carriage, sat down on my bed and read what I had written. It wasn’t very good. My spelling hadn’t improved in the years since I left school, and I had no idea where in a sentence to put punctuation. And my typing skill was … an abomination. But all that seemed OK because an important piece of knowledge had come to me while I’d been typing. I realized that I wasn’t thinking about my life and how it had gone to hell. I was just typing words on a sheet of paper. I was thinking only of what I was writing.

So, I decided to write something about my life. I didn’t want to be profound or literary because I am not a profound guy. I have always been a reader and I like books, so I decided, well, why not?

And that day, I began to write a story about me on the same paper my father had used, on his old portable typewriter. 

Six months of typing later I had 250 pages. I didn’t want to show these pages to anyone because I was pretty sure that what I had written was awful. But I also knew that I had to show them to someone if I was to keep going. I needed feedback. I had to find out if I was wasting my time or not.

I’d met a guy from my meetings, a literary guy. He’d been a freelance writer for magazines and a very capable reporter before he’d become a daily drunk, then eventually cleaned up his act.

He was writing again and had moved to an apartment on Venice Beach. Before he’d left Malibu, he gave me his number.

A week later I sat on his couch looking out at the ocean, smoking his cigarettes and drinking his coffee while he read what I wrote. My stuff.

When he was done a couple of hours later he looked up at me. “Well look, Dan,” he said, “I think you’ve got something here.”

He wrapped the big rubber bands back around the manuscript and then flopped it down next to me on the couch.

He lit a cigarette. “It’s pretty nuts and scattered and obscene, but I like it. It’s actually good.”

Back downstairs I got in my mom’s Chrysler and drove out to Point Dume thinking about my friend and some suggestions he offered me on how to make it great using my voice. 

Six months later I had rewritten the manuscript, and it had bulged to about 400 pages. I brought it back to my writer pal in Venice. He was now a contribution editor for a big-time magazine.

“It’s better,” he said, the next morning over the phone. “Much better. But now it’s way too long.”

I wasn’t discouraged or angry. I hung up and felt the determination to make the manuscript as good as it could be.

Something that Jack Kerouac once said began driving me: I want to work in revelations not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish deep down in my subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down.

   
I finished my novel a year later and I called it Chump Change. I found an agent through another recovering friend, who sent my manuscript out more than 40 times. It was rejected everywhere it was sent. She finally gave up and mailed me a note telling me how she’d done her best but that my manuscript was not, from her point of view, commercial fiction.

So, I began sending the book out myself. Every week on my lunch hour from my job, I went to the post office and mailed out two copies with a cover letter to more publishers around the country. More time passed. Nothing happened.

Then, a fan of my father’s work, a French singer named April March, who had a decent following in Europe, read the manuscript and with my permission, sent it off to the Parisian publisher Robert Laffont. Three weeks after that, I got a contract and a check in the mail. I’d become a French writer.

Now, it is almost 14 years later. It is May 2009. And I have books in almost every bookstore in America — just like my father. My new novel from Harper Perennial is called 86’d, and it will be released this October, and I am currently at work on what will become my 10th published book. I’ve now written novels, plays, poetry and short stories. Apparently, I’m a writer. I even have a Web site.

It all began with a beat-up Smith Corona typewriter and half a ream of yellow legal paper in Malibu, with John Fante’s bad-tempered ghost standing behind my chair. And not drinking blended whiskey.

April 8, 2009 was the 100th anniversary of John Fante’s birth. 

That’s a brief 58-year history of a family from Malibu. And so it goes.

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