Dan Fante - Chump Change: A Novel

MY NAME IS BRUNO DANTE AND WHAT IM WRITING ABOUT here is what happened. On December 4th, the St. Joseph of Cupertino Hospital alcohol and nut ward in the Bronx, on Mosholu Parkway, let me go. Released me, again. Each time I took their 28-day cure I found out how much their in-patient charges went up. This last time, I stabbed myself in a blackout and they almost wouldnt accept me as a patient. This last time was the worst, because all that I could remember seeing when I came around was the blood gushing out of my stomach onto my clothes.

My first recovery at St. Joes was paid for by my wife Agness insurance from her job. It worked okay. Then two years went by, with some shrink work, and it happened againa ten-day drunk and another suicide attempt. Booze and coke. By the second stay, the cost had increased from eighty-five hundred dollars to twelve thousand dollars, and that time the fee came out of our pocketthought we still had money in the bank then. I stopped the shrink because I was still drinking and not getting any better. With this cure, the third, I was a charity case. It would have cost twenty-five K.

When I drink for too many days in a row, especially wine, I think too much and my mind wants to kill me. This last time, in a county shithole, my bed was bolted to the floor and I was strapped to it. Normal people dont get locked up in detox. And the average person wont end up with a knife is his stomach tomorrow morning. But I have these consciousness lapses, and more and more in those lapses, I do behavior that I cant remember. Theyre blackouts. I know what they are. Then Agnes had me transferred to St. Joes.

My behavior is often extreme and destructive and happens because I am unable to tolerate myself when Im soberafter I remember or find out what Ive done on a binge. So I drink again to fix that. Like I said, mostly wine because regular alcohol stopped getting me off quite a while ago. I only drink regular booze to maintain. The last year or so its only the wine that gets me to the other side.

This time, wine and sex set off the insanity which led to the suicide attempt. Im not a homosexual, but I was out of control, blasted on Mad Dog 20-20 in a porno movie on Fourteenth Street. I allowed two guys to watch while I fucked this other guy. They were jerking each other off. Stuff like that. I was in and out of consciousness but I remember most of what took place. I dont know why I did it, except that I must have wanted to. That night I used the steak knife on myself.

The cures have no lasting effect. Theyll help for a while. Ill stay away from wine for weeks or months and just drink booze, but then something will happen in my head and Ill be off again.

What I want to say here is that there is a place beyond control and beyond concern that people can go, where the values and the needs of everyday life change completely. Where what matters is moment-to-moment survival to avoid mind pain.

Delbert was in the nut house with me. Ill tell about him here. We were roommates there for three weeks. Hes a guy from Lubbock, Texas who ended up in Accounts Payable in a Wall Street company. He has this family with 2.1 kids and a wife that cooks dinner. How it happens in specific detail is not important, but Delbert comes home every day and goes to work like he is supposed to, and he does this for ten years or so. He is unhappy with problems like everybody gets, so he drinks at lunch sometimes and then goes home and sits in front of the TV at night and drinks some more. On weekends he drinks too. But it stayed under control for many years. Delbert is like everybody else. He is no different. He is a working guy. A family man. One day, he notices that he needs to drink in the morning just to keep his nerves steady. He doesnt want the lady at the ticket booth in the Long Island Railroad to see him shake when he buys his ticket, or the secretaries at the office to notice he has a problem when he pours his office coffee. So he becomes a morning drinker out of necessity.

Then, after work one night, Del comes home a bit toasted and has another argument with the old lady about his drinking. (What Im saying here is average stuff. It happens to normal people.) He leaves and goes to the bar and comes back completely shit-faced at 2:00 a.m. and gets in bed with his ten-year-old daughter, Melissa. He doesnt know the difference. Awake and sober, it would be incomprehensible to him to be on top of his own daughter, fucking her and hurting her. The wife hears the noises and finds them there.

Delbert is sorry and his insurance pays for him to come to Saint Joseph of Cupertinos detox. He didnt know that he had let it go this far. Didnt really think himself capable of sliding his dick deeply into his daughters little body.

Can Delbo forgive himself? Apparently not, because he hung himself last week and is now dead.

That night I had dozed off and woke up again at four-thirty to take a piss. Delbert was not in his bed across from mine. I walked down the corridor past the rec room to the bathrooms. I knew that he was upset working through the shame and the truth that he was a daughter-rapist and an alcoholic.

The rec room door is always kept closed because patients are not allowed in, except when the room is supervised. Theres Delbert. Hes slashed his wrists and hung himself at the same time. Blood everywhere. Before lights-out, we were discussing the playoffs. He was a committed Cowboys fan. So long, Delbert.

My wife, Agnes, arrived to pick me up in a cab. Two days early. She hates me and our marriage, but is never late for anything. It was a checker taxi and it was waiting outside with the meter running.

I said goodbye to Ed D., Capgun Steve and the other guys standing around while the cabbie slammed my stuff in the trunk. Ed made Vs with both hands and held them up like an imitation of Nixon. We shook hands and said, see ya.

Agnes didnt talk at all as we drove. I smoked and watched the Grand Concourse roll by for ten minutes before she told me that Jonathan Dante, my father, was dying in L.A. from failed kidneys and diabetes and that was the reason I was released early from treatment. Hed been at home in my mothers care after a second leg amputation, when his old, abused, blind diabetic body decided to give out and quit. His remains were in ICU at Cedars in serious condition.

Agnes and I had been married for eleven years. She was a teacher and the daughter of Jewish parents from the Bronx. Black eyes and black hair and a wonderful ass like the pillow of an angel. We met one night at a poetry reading on Second Avenue when I was still writing.

I had read two of my published things, short angry pieces. She found them good and had asked a colleague literature teacher to put us together, which she had. Aggie thought that poets drinking tequila were romantic, so we went back to my room to discuss W. B. Yeats.

We lived together after that, and I worked and she worked, and for most of the time, while I was still writing at night, things were okay. But I had frequent headaches and depression about my poetry and low income from dismal-paying shit jobs. I was overly critical and cruel to Agnes, so I self- prescribed whiskey to pick up my spirits, and discovered that the depressions lessened when I drank and didnt write. I stopped criticizing Agnes, but I also stopped caring.