Spitting Off Tall Buildings by Dan Fante

both certifiable wacks and their operation ran in continual bedlam. Yelling was the only communication method. Also, they’d jerry-rigged and substituted so many parts under the hood of each van to save money that what had been fixed only days before almost always would re-break right away.
    The best mini-bus of the three ran good but had no heater. The driver and his passengers would freeze their asses off but usually always get to their destination. The second one had a secret gasoline leak that stank up the vehicle and a weird alignment problem from an accident. It crabbed down the thruway at an angle and would wear out a set of front tires every couple of weeks.
    The last one was the worst. I was low man so I was stuck with it. Two of the motor’s cylinders were inoperable and a billow of thick, uncombusted oil smoke trailed me through the New York streets like relentless fucking Jobert in Les Miserables.
    Passengers griped constantly and self-righteous ecological motorists would honk and gesture at the virulent gray gook as it billowed out the tail pipe. Once, at a stop light, an indignant, coughing pedestrian with a metal-hilted walker cane put a crack in the driver’s side window by tapping too hard.
    In my third week on the job my van’s engine finally seized up and quit. I was in rush-hour traffic on the Van Wyck Expressway five miles from Kennedy Airport. A sudden lurching occurred, then a clanking, then a thud. Ugly, black smoke and the stench of burning rubber began filling the interior of the van.
    My passengers were forced from the vehicle and had to wait by the side of the freeway in twenty-degree weather until Hector arrived in his Chevy repair station wagon. They all missed their flights.
    That night, when we finally got back, Hector gave me fifty dollars, laid me off, and confessed that they could not afford to have the van’s engine rebuilt anytime soon.

Chapter Nine
    THE TICKET-TAKER DOORMAN job was from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. at an after-hours club called Ponce in Times Square. Tips only. I had been misinformed about the earning potential, retaliated by reporting drunk, and was let go on the third night.
    It was lunchtime. I walked cross-town to the bank to cash an old Workpower company check for $16.23 that I’d been keeping in my wallet as a back-up. Eight people were waiting for service in the customer line and there were two tellers. Only two tellers. Lunch hour. I waited. Minutes passed but none of us in the line moved.
    Then one of the tellers, a Middle Eastern-looking human, having finished with the patron she’d been attending, put her ‘ NEXT WINDOW PLEASE ’ sign up, and walked away.
    I began yelling. I yelled at the official-looking assholes sitting behind the railing at the desks. The suits. There were two of them. I also yelled at the one remaining teller, a bald guy. What I yelled was as follows: ‘Hey goddammit, I’m a customer here! Hey! An American-fucking-citizen! Look at me when I’m talking to you!…Hey, goddammit! You’ve got people waiting here for service. Where are the tellers? Are you fucking blind? You need more tellers! Our money sits there in your fucking vault earning interest so you can live in New Rochelle and bribe union guys and invest in oilstocks but we can’t get a fucking check cashed in your bank or consummate a simple chickenshit transaction?…You sir, at the desk, does the word asshole hold any meaning for you? Oh sorry, how about rectum?…Hey, don’t you get it? Wake the fuck up! We need some service here!’
    The guard came over. A dildo wearing a gun with a different kind of foreign accent and enlarged pores on his nose. The guard put his hand on my arm and told me that I would have to quiet down. I yelled at him too and I continued yelling until after they called a beat cop to get me out of the bank. But they cashed my check.

Chapter Ten
    THE BELT GIG was okay. My rooming-house neighbor, an actor queen named Dylan, who I always passed in the hall,