Spitting Off Tall Buildings by Dan Fante
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Bruno Dante is a loner, a guy who wants to spend time in his room reading Tennesse Williams’ plays but has to venture out to earn money. He cleans windows, drives a cab, and is an usher at a theatre. He hates his bosses, customers, and sometimes his colleagues.
Going back into his room the ruminative inner voice of judgement doesn’t leave him alone for a minute:
“I got up and went to my writing table, looking down at the pages and pages of words. It was true. I saw the misspellings, the hurried errors, my hopeless, inaccurate punctuation. Slobbo! I flung the pages in the direction of the trash can. I was talentless. No wonder I drank and let queers suck my cock. Loser! Stuck with no job, near penniless, walled in like a cockroach surrounded by a rooming house full of junkies and perverts. I was finally where I really belonged.”
I’m not a big fan of novels where the main character is a would-be writer – it’s one of the things I didn’t like about Ask the Dusk, by the author’s more famous father, John Fante. I will never read something by Fante Sr. again but can’t wait to get to the next Dan Fante.
Bruno Dante, Dan Fante’s alter ego in the book, is trying to write a story about a magician tricking a boy into poisoning his dog. It sounds like a dark Harry Potter tale. But what’s happening to him outside – the world of shitty jobs – is the material that will eventually inspire good writing. This is ironic but not unusual for a writer. He wants to hide from the world outside but this world is what he has to write about. In writing about it he’ll process the pain.
When things go wrong with a job and he gets fired or quits, inevitably he goes on a drinking binge:
“The run lasted three days after that. When I finally sobered up my mind began mercilessly replaying some of the flashes, the unquenchable need for sex and depravity. The thoughts evoked so much disgust that I had to stop them – shut them off – there was a terrible need to kill myself; cut or stab my flesh. To die immediately.”
I’ll get to the self-harm, but in terms of sex, when he needs it and has no money, it’s with men at movie theatres. Sex, as in blowjobs. But when he has money:
“… I was waiting in the lounge of the Oriental Massage in Times Square; waiting to spend an hour with Sandy, the pretty Korean hooker. “
This is a common sort of sex life for a down-and-out alcoholic. It’s something I could be criticised for saying these days, but I don’t think he was bisexual. In actions sure, in orientation no. It’s just that sex with men is always there when he needs it. Fante’s descriptions of illicit sex are less detached than those of William Burroughs. None of the boozing and sex can silence the demons and so he cuts his wrists, survives, and gets locked up.
“In New York State there is a law that says that they are allowed to lock you down in the squirrel ward for ten days when you attempt to take your own life. It doesn’t matter if you ate pills and cut your wrists, drank drain cleaner or injected 200 ccs of nail polish remover into your carotid artery. If you live, they’ve got you.”
After that he gets a therapist he likes:
“To Jack, being an alcoholic is a mind disease like manic depression. It describes the way an alkie’s mind has come to work. Sober or drunk. He said that my depressions and rages and disgusting degenerate behavior and the other stuff were by-products of my alcoholism.”
Dante is a madman and alcohol has been his medicine but it’s turning on him now at age 34. I had a similar experience in my mid-thirties, alcohol would no longer calm my anxiety but instead heightened it to unbearable levels.
“Booze, Jack says, can work real well for years, like a pill, to treat this personality. But eventually it has to turn on you, stop working, and bite you on the ass. According to Jack, that’s what happened to me.”
Missing in this review are quotes of the descriptions of being a cab driver, window washer etc. These are highlights – up there with Bukowski’s Post Office, if not quite as sustained. Spitting Off Tall Buildings hangs around for a punchy hundred pages.
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