5

IN THE WAITING ROOM WE ALL SAT, EXPECTING THE appearance of Dr. Stein. It had been decided by my mother to pull Jonathan Dante’s tubes out and simply let him die. She needed Stein’s permission.

Copacabana was furious with Dwight. Copa’s lover, Paris, had left a suicide note and Dwight had been withholding it. Paris had been pronounced dead and, only now, had Dwight finally handed the note to Copacabana.

We sat on our couches across the room watching Copa read the message on the paper and go nuts. The note blamed him, and Copa was much too loaded to be blamed.

He jumped up and began cursing Dwight for taking Paris France’s side even though Dwight had said nothing. Next to me, I could see that Fabrizio found the whole display intolerable. We were the serious grievers.

Finally, I asked Copa to please shut the fuck up. That we (my family and me) were in the room too. What I said made him crazy. He came at me, crying and spitting like a child in a tantrum. “You can lick the shit off my dick after I fuck mommy up the ass,” is what he screamed in my face. Then, “Leave me alone, you cocksucking little runt dyke!”

I got up without considering anything and hit him in the face. He went down suddenly when the blow caught him flush on the side of his cheek.

For a second he lay there holding his jaw, stunned. Then quickly, stupidly, he got up and lunged at me again with insane eyes.

I hit him more, this time in the mouth and on the side of his head behind his ear. He fell hard against the linoleum and his skull made a thud as it collided with the polished surface.

There was blood on his shirt and face as he rushed me again, clawing and tearing at my hair and skin.

Now I was afraid he was on something like Sherm, that killed pain, or a form of speed. He might just keep coming at me.

I was angry. I wanted to fuck him up real good.

The next time he charged, I threw him down and hit him again and again in the nose and mouth until my own fist bled and ached.

Fab and Benny Roth pushed me off.

After it was over, my mother wouldn’t let me stay in the waiting room. Maggie had called a hospital cop who insisted that I leave before I was detained. Dwight got Copa onto the couch and he looked like he’d be okay.

Because Fab was returning to Malibu to pick up my wife and bring her to the hospital, I decided to have him take me back there. They insisted that Fab leave immediately and take me along.

It cost five dollars to get out of the hospital parking lot. Fab paid. On the way down La Cienega toward the freeway he was excited about the fight and wanted to talk about what had happened. I didn’t.

I had a desperate need for silence. To be alone. I wanted to catch the next plane for New York or Texas, or be dropped off in the desert. I was shaking uncontrollably and unable to calm down. To subdue my rattling hands, I pinned them under my arm pits. Then I demanded that he stop at the first liquor store.

Fabrizio ignored me. He was popping out strings of syllables like an out-of-tune car that won’t stop running after the engine is turned off. On he went about my fight and then about a punchout of his own that he had with an ROTC guy two years before while on weekend maneuvers.

Something, somewhere in Fabrizio’s history, had permitted him to conclude that anybody riding in his car must listen to what he was saying. Did I always react with violence? Did I have to fight a lot in jail and in my in-patient programs? Did the cops ever club me when I got arrested? Was it my experience that the majority of men turn queer behind bars?

I grabbed his arm and squeezed the bicep as hard as I could. People like him, I yelled, always got butt-fucked first in jail by brothers named Bubba, because people like him were self-righteous, dickless punks. Easy targets.

I was close to out-of-control again and he could sense it, so he pulled into the next liquor store parking lot.

My mind was still racing and crazy as I got out of the car. I sensed that my body might be giving out too. The nausea was back. There had been only four or five hours sleep for the last few days. The feelings that I was having were too fast and too many. I hoped some drinks would push the head into relaxation and help the body not puke or die. I hoped this time I’d be able to calm down because, for months, whiskey had only been working irregularly.

I got my bottle and a carton of Marlboro Red and when I was back in the car I told my brother that I was sorry if I’d scared him. I said I was sick and messed up these days and that I didn’t mean most of the things I did and that was why I kept getting locked up all the time. He made a face like he understood. Like I was a whacked out deranged fuck, but that it was okay.

We headed south again on La Cienega. “You’re really shaking bad,” he said.

“I know,” I said, cracking the bottle and taking several drinks from it. “It should be okay in a minute or two.”

“Tell me why you punched that queer so many times. I thought you were going to kill him. Your eyes looked crazy. Do you always lose it like that when you get into a physical thing?”

“It started out that he was out of line. Then I lost it.”

“Did you know what you were doing?”

“I think so. I didn’t care. Sometimes I don’t care what happens at all.”

After another long slam on the jug, I passed it to Fab. I was sorry for what I had said to him and for grabbing him in anger and I was still not sure that I had been forgiven.

It surprised me when he accepted the bottle and had a hit, then passed it back. My shaking was going away.

“Right,” Fabrizio said, his tongue swamped with saliva from the stinging of the whiskey, “You inherited Dad’s meanness, that nasty temper.”

“Correct,” I said, “the temperament, not his talent.”

We took the Coast Highway. Not talking. Every time I passed the jug to my brother, he obliged and took a hit. At the area of the Malibu Pier, I suggested that we stop at a restaurant to make a phone call and see if Jonathan Dante was dead. I knew the answer. Fabrizio pulled in without argument. The whiskey had loosened his cork.

Inside the restaurant, a section was closed, still being repaired from the last fire. We sat at the bar, looking out the bay window at the water and the surfers. It was hot for December. Seventy-five.

The pretty girl bartender wore a starched tuxedo blouse, buttoned to the top, and a bow tie. She called herself Wilson and her black lacy bra with its doily pattern was visible, as her tits pushed against the inside of the front of the shirt. Her hair was black, too, and her lipstick was red-red and she free-poured a reasonable glass.

Fab made the call about the old man. I would not. He went to the bathroom to use the pay phone, while Wilson poured me number two and I waited for what was coming.

When my brother came back and sat beside me, he was smiling. “He won’t quit,” he said.

“He’s not dead?”

“Not better, but not dead. He’s hanging on. No life support. Stein told Mom it’s his heart. It refuses to stop. It’s the only organ he has still functioning and it won’t give out. He’s like a miracle.”

Then Fab began to cry. The booze had been a lubricant for him to finally love our father without restraint.

He drank and wept. Half an hour later, he was out of control and in love with Wilson and talking philosophically about death. His American Express card was on the bar, so she kept pouring.

He wanted to impress her, so he described how much he loved his father and what an unsatisfied poet’s life the old man had led. Of course, Wilson had never heard Jonathan Dante’s name as a writer of anything. Nobody had, except people in the film business, and most of them were dead.

The Dante I was remembering was more prick, less poet. This bar reminded me of the time when I was twelve when my father had told me and my friends that he was taking me to a Dodger playoff game. Instead, he’d gotten drunk and staggered in the house long after the game had been over.

My brother began reciting lines to Wilson from a poem he’d memorized long ago. I sipped my glass and listened. The words sounded familiar, like something clumsy out of my father’s early work, like a lyrical passage from one of his novels.

Then, I realized, to my shock, that he was reciting my own work from twenty years before, printed originally in the Saint Monica’s High School newspaper. I’d written it as an English assignment and had eventually edited it and had it published in a Museum Magazine years later in New York.

Hearing the recitation terrified and sickened me. I began grabbing his arm, but he wouldn’t stop. It reminded me of what a fake I had been as a writer. Pretentious, unskilled, shameless.

I felt as if some drunken Italian uncle had stood me on a chair at a family gathering and loudly related the story of discovering me in a closet masturbating. I was lucky it wasn’t a long poem.

I said, “Where did you learn that?”

“The old man. He knew it by heart. He gave me the magazine.”

“Don’t do that again.”

Fabrizio leaned over to Wilson. “It was beautiful, wasn’t it?” he said. “A snapshot of a poem. Like haiku.”

Wilson smiled, knowing that not talking was one of her best features. Fab put his arm around my shoulder. His speech was slobbery. “…a poet’s harp—syllables dipped in truth…he always said you had the gift…he loves you.”

The year I had written the poem in high school, I had gotten a letter from my father addressed to me with Italian stamps on the envelope. He had been in Rome, rewriting scenes from a gangster show. It was the only letter I’d ever gotten from Jonathan Dante. There had been no mention of the poem but I knew that was why he wrote to me. It was his acknowledgement.

I still had the letter. I kept it folded in the fly leaf of a book of Pirandello short stories.