Spitting Off Tall Buildings (10 page)

THE UNION GUY told me that my first Temporary Disability check would come any day. But I was in trouble, overpowered by depression. It wouldn’t go away. Now it didn’t matter how much alcohol I drank, I could no longer get drunk. All it did was dull me, make me slow-witted, but not drunk.

At night until four or five o’clock or until I could doze off, I’d watch TV; re-reruns of day-time talk shows, mindless bunk. Fat people who had fucked other fat people’s sisters or aunts or best friends coming on TV to confess and scream. The best part was the commercials, the home gadgets and infomercials. Exercise gadgets and diet machines invented by guys who’d written books and knew everything.

SEA-MATION
is a service I’d see advertised all the time. The gimmick is cremation plus burial at sea. All in one:
SEA-MATION
. A fellow with a grey toupee gives the pitch while they continue flashing the 800 phone number of the company on the bottom of the screen.

SEA-MATION
had a sale going, a ‘pre-need special.’ Ordering now saved you ninety-nine ninety-five. One week only.

I called the flashing 800 telephone number. ‘Hello,’ the voice said. ‘
SEA-MATION
, Mike speaking. May I have your area code first, then your telephone number…’

I was using the rooming house’s hall pay phone but I gave him the number anyway.

‘Your name, sir?’

‘Bruno…Bruno Dante. D…A…N…T…E.’

‘Thank you for calling
SEA-MATION
, Mr. Dante. How may I assist you this morning?’

‘I saw your commercial on the TV, Mike.’

‘Our pre-need special, “Passage to Serenity.” Five hundred and ninety-nine dollars?’

‘Yeah…the one on TV. The sale.’

‘I’ll need to get some preliminary information, Mr. Dante. Do you have a few minutes to do that with me?’

‘That’s why I called. I’m an interested caller, Mike.’

‘Well, good, sir. Excellent…Now, would our services be for yourself or a family member?’

‘The services would be for me, Mike. Myself. Bruno.’

‘Thank you for considering
SEA-MATION
to sustain you in your final resting arrangements, Mr. Dante. Pre-need planning, of course, is the sensible and economical option to the high cost of a sudden-need situation. Most importantly, pre-need planning eliminates confusion for your survivors at what can be a very anxious time, as I’m sure you would agree.’

‘I agree, Mike…Let’s keep going.’

‘Now, about the specifics of your requirements, Mr. Dante?…’

‘Go ahead, Mike. Go ahead and ask.’

‘Is there a time factor involved in scheduling your pre-need, Mr. Dante?’

‘What time factor, Mike?’

‘I’m sorry…I wasn’t being clear…What I mean is, have you been advised as to how soon you’ll be needing services?’

‘When I’m going to die?’

‘Yes, sir. That’s correct.’

‘Okay. I see…Tomorrow, Mike. Tomorrow morning.’

‘…I’m very sorry, Mr. Dante…I’m sure that was difficult news. May I please have the name and telephone
number of your attending physician? Full name. First name first, please…’

‘I don’t have an attending physician, Mike.’

‘…Name of hospital or facility and room number, please?’

‘I’m not in the hospital or in a facility.’

‘…I see…Mr. Dante, I’m sorry for asking this at such an uncomfortable time, but could you tell me the nature of your illness?’

‘Okay…sure…I refilled my prescription for Valium today. I took a handful before I called you, about twenty or so…’

‘Wait…You just took
pills?’

‘About five minutes ago. I was on hold listening to the music. I’m drinking too…I’ll be taking the last thirty - they’re ten-milligram Valium - and twenty-five Fiorinal, after we hang up. I’m going to kill myself. So…I guess my illness is an overdose. To be safe, if I were you, I’d just put down heart failure. That’ll cover it.’

On the other end Mike had stopped reading from his telephone script.

‘C’mon sir,’ he said, ‘you’re not serious?…You’re kidding, right?’

‘No. I’m being serious. It’s checkout time.’

‘Look…Bruno. It’s Bruno, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Look Bruno. This’s like…absurd. You seem to be an intelligent person. I mean, you sound a little stoned and all but…did you really take twenty Valium?…Hey, wait; is this Robert? Godammit man, don’t screw around!…’

‘I took pills, Mike. Ten minutes ago. I’m about to take some more. I haven’t got much time here…’

‘Shit!…Okay, look…Bruno, Mr. Dante…let me get my supervisor. I don’t know what to say. This is an
exceptional circumstance. I’m going to put you on hold a second, okay?’

‘No. Don’t do that. I need to know now.’

‘…Jesus…Look, I mean, you’re absolutely positive about this?’

‘Yes…Correct.’

‘Well, shit. Jesus…You’re really going through with it?’

‘It’s a done deal.’

‘…Okay…Mr. Dante…Okay. Well…I didn’t mention yet that there’s an additional bonus discount of ten percent off our TV special if you pay right now over the phone with your Visa or Mastercard? Did you want to take advantage of that discount?’

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. The rules are the same for everybody. Dylan, my high-strung faggot neighbor across the hall who always hears everything anyway, heard my end of the phone call to
SEA-MATION
at five o’clock in the morning. I found out later that he’s the one that called 911 after I’d gone back to my room and locked the door. I don’t remember any of it. Not the ambulance. Nothing.

In New York Hospital they assigned me to Jack Bratter. A shrink. Jack’s job was to bring me in twice a day for private sessions, ask a lot of questions and determine if I was crazy and a danger to myself. He would evaluate whether or not I should be let go or placed in a rubber condo somewhere. I didn’t care. I didn’t give a rat’s dick what they did with me.

Jack was a good guy. Older, but smart. He had been a desk sergeant in Manhattan South for twelve years before retiring from the police. He’d gone back to school at Hunter College, then taken up shrink as a profession. He liked that I was a writer. He had read some of my father’s books. We talked a
lot about plays. His theatrical interest was in classic theatrical comedy; Molière, guys like that.

I told Jack the truth. Mostly. I said things had come to a head after the hold-up. The despair, et cetera.

Jack was more concerned about my drinking than anything else. Also about my anger fits while I was drinking and sober. He was curious to know the kinds of things that set me off; what I thought about this and what I thought about that: ‘What did you think then, Bruno?…After that happened, how did you feel?…You must’ve been upset.’ Blah, blah, blah…Blah, blah, blah.

One week into the deal, after the individual sessions and twice-a-day in group, Jack gave me some news. ‘Good news,’ he said. He had determined that I was not crazy. That the twenty-four-hour-a-day voices in my head and my behavior were, to him, symptoms of alcoholism.

According 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.

Alkies, Jack says, are characterized not only by their drinking, which of course is the main big symptom, but also by their craziness while they are sober. After a certain point in the progression of the disease a person’s perceptions change. There is an automatic mental distortion of information; damaged, fucked mental software. With and without a drink.

Jack says that I had developed this type of ‘personality’ over time. A new character. To keep my mind comfortable and under control, my disease required me to drink more and more because things in the world become more and more unacceptable with my type of alcoholic ‘personality.’

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.

He said this: that there was nothing really he could do to help me stop the depressions or trying to kill myself. In his experience, still-drinking alcoholics like me, as a functioning, walking-around class of people, are the furthest from any kind of emotional or spiritual peace. From God.

At the end of the mandatory ten days, on the morning of my release from the hospital, Jack said that if I continued with booze I would be like someone carrying cans of gasoline to a fire. He said there wasn’t much hope.

I liked Jack. They were letting me out and they could no longer hold me for any reason so I was completely straight with him. I said honestly that I did not agree. To me I was chemically imbalanced. I needed some kind of medication; Prozak or Elavil or lithium. One of those. Other people on my ward who took mood stabilizers had my same symptoms. Jack refused to give me anything to help so I got up and walked out.

ME AND MY rooming-house manager, Bert, had always gotten on fairly well. Bert was part Indian. American Indian. Big and mean but he liked me because we both drank whiskey and we were both fans of the New York Mets.

He’d arrived in Manhattan five years before me with his old lady Angel-Lee and their two kids. At the time the couple met and started a relationship he was forty-one, Angel was nineteen. She had been a dancer, the prettiest black girl in Fort Smith.

For his first few years in New York Bert worked in construction assembly, steel framing on skyscrapers. Then, by chance, he discovered his real aptitude; the one for insurance scams and welfare swindling.

One day at the job site he slipped on a cable spool, fell, and got a minor strain in his back. He decided to fake it a little and take a few days off to watch the end of the baseball playoffs on TV. His job foreman sent him to a doctor. There in the waiting room Bert ran into a guy he had once worked with. Another Indian. The guy had a limp and was walking with a cane but he was wearing a colorful Hawaiian sports shirt. In their conversation it came out that the fellow had been collecting $540 tax free every two weeks for the last year for his own back injury. Currently, he was spending his afternoons making bets and limping up and down the steps to the Club House at Aquaduct racetrack.

That was the beginning.

Three years later Bert was deep into a Workman’s Comp lawsuit and opening his mail twice a month to find over a thousand dollars’ worth of checks from the insurance company. His bogus back-injury claim had begun that day at the doctor’s office. These days Bert spent his time drinking whiskey and Rheingold beer, watched the Mets on TV, and, as an under-the-table sideline, managing the rooming house where I lived.

He and Angel had never officially married so she was on welfare as an unemployed single mother. Her own second income came from a steady night gig, waitressing in a titty bar off Times Square. The girls, twins, Carrie and Connie, were now eleven years old. Nice kids. Sweet.

Bert knew about my hold-up in the taxi. It was he and my neighbor Dylan who had unlocked my door to let the police and the paramedics in after I tried to kill myself by taking the Valium and pain pills.

The afternoon I got back from the hospital and knocked on his door to get my mail and pay my back rent, Bert asked me inside. He always had beer, good and cold, so I stepped in.

During one of the commercials Bert smiled over at me and slapped his leg. He asked me if I had ever heard of Victim Stress Disorder. I said that I had not. Then he began to laugh. It continued for several seconds. When he stopped he was standing over my chair and pointing down. He said that to him, the second after I’d opened his front door, he knew. I looked like a man with incurable Victim Stress Disorder. For the rest of the afternoon we talked about VSD and drank and watched the Mets lose.

Bert’s attorney was Robert Edward Francis Duffy. Duffy’s office was on Twenty-third Street in the Flatiron Building. He
practiced one kind of law only: work-related personal injury. Workman’s Comp lawsuits.

Bert bragged that Duffy had an address book overflowing with the names of orthopedists, shrinks and miscellaneous personal-injury experts. He said that if he wanted to Duffy could have six doctors in a courtroom tomorrow morning at eight o’clock who would testify under oath and certify that I was unemployable and crazier than a blue chicken.

The following morning I went with Bert, who had ambitions of collecting a referral fee, downtown to see Bob Duffy at his office. It turned out that attorney Duffy had settled two prior cabbie hold-up claims using Victim Stress Disorder as the basis for the lawsuits. The first trauma case was similar to mine; a guy had been robbed at gunpoint, shoved into his cab’s trunk and left freezing for twelve hours in a parking lot in Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn. Duffy’d won a juicy award from Workman’s Comp because of permanent frostbite damage to three of the man’s fingers and chronic VSD. The guy’s name was Joseph Kallit. Eventually Kallit moved with his mother and his wife Louise to Florida, where they purchased a condo with their end of the settlement money and he took up playing the trombone.

Me and Bert sat in the two leather chairs in front of Duffy’s desk while the lawyer ran down a list of Victim Stress Disorder symptoms. The three of us counted. Five of the symptoms applied to me. I signed up right there and became a client.

Before we left the office Duffy got on the phone and made an appointment for me to begin regular therapy sessions and counseling with a doctor - Doctor Gromis. The way it worked, he said, was that Gromis would immediately submit my forms and I could expect to receive my first Workman’s
Comp benefit check in a week to ten days. $232 a week. $928 per month. Indefinitely. Duffy announced that I now had a chronic, medically documented case of Victim Stress Disorder.