Full Carburettor V8 Son of a Bitch
Dan Fante
by Jason Hamilton
Be forewarned, there are both a Barnes and Noble and a Borders bookstore involved in that whole Third Street Promenade business. I had already parked in a completely different time zone and was about 10 minutes late when I got to Barnes and Noble for the interview. That is when, of course, I looked up and realized this was not Borders bookstore. Great. As you may or may not know Borders is another, what, 4-5 five blocks away that walk like miles. Huffing and searching for Dan Fante, I picked him out immediately from the description, leather jacket, calm, hardly the vision of the wild Bruno Dante. We shook hands, my eyes drawn to the memorial of his brother slain by alcoholism tattooed on his arm. I ordered an Apple juice from the chick at the bookstore counter and sat down to pleasantries. I am not sure if we ever began or ended the interview. I listened and asked what I wanted and he responded with what came out.
Dan Fante: There’s so much going on in L.A. The thing that bothers me is that there’s so much beneath the main stream that is so important that is not recognized. I’ve begun to really appreciate L.A. you know. I’ve had the opportunity to travel to Europe a couple of times a year and I’ve lived in New York and I just find Los Angeles the place where you can be anything you want to be. There’s an enormous freedom here still, and um it’s kind of unacknowledged, kind of you have to find it for yourself. This is a city much like New York in that way, where you have to find what your looking for, but in L.A., for a writer or artist it’s a great place. I feel unencumbered here really. The most important thing, in New York, I always felt strapped in because of the seasons and I was back here a year or so ago, one of my plays was being done…
Jason Hamilton: Boiler Room, didn’t they change the name?
The Closer.
That’s what I thought I read.
That’s being done again in…
September.
Ah yes, but it’s also I just heard being done, I heard from some guys in Switzerland, in a 600 seat theater in Geneva translated into French and done there.
Wow, how does that work?
I don’t know (laugh). My books do pretty well in Europe. This fellow read my books in French and went to my website and said what is it about this play. I love your books and your father’s works. Will you give me some more information about this play? We started kicking it back and forth and he said, “I’d like to do it in Geneva. It’s a great group and they have a wonderful big theatre.” So it’s going to be done in Switzerland.
Cool.
Yeah, that’s pretty cool.
The play is coming in September to L.A. then?
The play. There’s a brilliant woman named Jolene Adams. She is the director of a theatre called the Actors Art Theatre on Wilshire Boulevard, Wilshire & Fairfax, and she produced The Closer in N.Y. and L.A. I sent her this recent book of poetry. It came out in England last year and will be out here in another month in hard back with paintings and it’s a beautiful book. So I sent Jolene the book and she said, “I want to do this as a play.” I said, “You nuts, there’s no play here.” She says, “Oh no your wrong, there’s definitely sequence, groupings, we can put the poems in groups.” And it’s opened and it’s a terrific piece of theatre. She doing my poems as a play. There are eight actors and each does ya know 4 or 5 poems and it’s just brilliant. Each one is it’s own scene and she’s tied them together, drinking and woman, writing and my father. It’s all tied together and it’s quite well done. We did about two months of it a couple of months ago and got quite nice reviews in the L.A. Weekly. We’re just going to open it again when the book comes out here.
I’d like to see that.
It’s called A Gin Pissing, Red Meat, V-8, Dual Carburettor Son-Of-A-Bitch From Los Angeles. So that’s the name of it and the fucking L.A. Weekly wouldn’t advertise it as that, because it uses profanity in it.
The L.A. Weekly wouldn’t do that?
They wouldn’t give us the what’s what and they wouldn’t even put it in there.
I am really surprised with the stuff that comes out of there. What about the screenplay for Chump Change?
Yeah, I did that for the guy that is producing Witchblade, a guy named Ralph Hemecker.
Oh yeah, a friend of mine Michael Turner did the original and was a creative consultant for the show.
Oh cool. Then he knows Ralph. Well Ralph, before they started Witchblade 2 1/2 years ago, read Chump Change and loved it and said I want to do this as a film. Now he’s done Millennium, the X-Files, he directed them, and Ralph is a very talented director for television. I’ve seen his stuff. He takes a lot of risk. I admire his work. So Ralph wanted to do this as a film. So he gave me some money for an option, which pleased me, and then he got famous. Witchblade became took off like a rocket ship. He renewed the option, got another year on the option but he didn’t have the time. So Witchblade does well and Chump Change languishes. We wrote, ah well Ralph wrote it, we sat down and outlined the book. It’s very cinematic.
Yes, I’ve read all three of the books.
Ok. So you see…visually… you can just visualize it. I didn’t do it intentionally…just the way I write. So we sat down and for the sake of argument there are 200 scenes that are worthwhile in Chump Change. We cut them down to 80 scenes. And then Ralph says well we’ll just take the dialogue from the book. That’s what he did. We really outlined the scenes, then he filled the dialogue and we submitted the screenplay. That was my contribution. So he put my name on it. It’s not bad, it’s a good beginning. You need to have something. Like I said, I admire Ralph’s work. It’s just unfortunate nothing is being done with Chump Change because it would be a great fucking movie.
I think so definitely.
Now, which of Mooch and Chump Change are more cinematic?
That’s tough but I would say Mooch.
Yeah.
Because there is more movement.
There’s more?
There is more action, there is more going on, there is just more movement and activity in the physical sense such as Boiler Room and the journeys.
Oh, I understand what you’re saying. Interestingly enough the other thing that is very important to me in both those books is to make Los Angeles a character, which is why Cesar Sanchez contacted me and why Albert Berlinski from Sun Dog Press told me L.A. Profiles was interested. I’m very interested in cultural Los Angeles and those books are about Los Angeles. They’re novels about this place. I mean the cafes and gas stations, they’re all there because I wanted specific locations. I did it intentionally because I wanted to give a sense of Los Angeles as a place and the alienation of the place and the people. This is a very…I think physically eclectic place; it’s a very scattered place.
Secluded, individual.
Yeah, very much so. As much as the analogy can be made with automobile consciousness. One-man to one-car. It really projects itself. We accuse people in New York of that. New Yorkers will stop and talk on the streets. People in L.A. will only yell fuck you between cars, you know what I mean. So yeah it is important for me to make Los Angeles a character.
What about Spitting Off Tall Buildings?
That’s the book that’s coming out now. It should be in this store.
I read that, from an advanced copy, this is set in New York. You are using the same character but not in a chronological set.
What do you mean by that?
Well chronologically, where the books fit together in terms of story.
Well, it actually is Spitting Off Tall Buildings comes first. The wisdom of the brain trust at Cannongate Books in Edinburough thought that this book should be released third now. So, in fact, as a set it’s not exactly a prequel because I hope each book is independent of itself. It wasn’t written as a prequel to Chump Change. It was written as an individual novel. After Chump Change I wrote a play The Closer then Spitting Off Tall Buildings, then I wrote Mooch but that is now not up to me. It is released third. It just kind of confuses the reader. Though I think in Spitting the character is younger, I am not sure, isn’t he younger in the book than he is in the others.
I don’t know about the age but the character does specifically refer to never being in New York.
You know what it is. I refer to New York in Mooch and Chump Change in past tense, that’s what fucks people up. That was a publishing decision. They wanted it that way. So this is just my opinion, they wanted Chump Change as the lead book and then Mooch because it has the same kind of punch as Chump Change does. Spitting Off Tall Buildings is not [the same]. As an author…I didn’t have he same intention in mind.
You can tell that.
Yeah it’s about a guy who is kind of lost. He’s not physically dealing with life and death like in Mooch and Chump Change. So there’s a difference and it was an easy book to write but it’s a good book. A couple of friends of mine, writer friends, prefer Spitting Off Tall Buildings to the other two, as a narrative in terms of the actual writing. There’s a fluency in Spitting Off Tall Buildings. It’s more literary than the others. I think it’s been hard to split the narrative. You now think of what my intent was but I know Chump Change and Mooch is a set and Spitting Off Tall Buildings was not the same intent.
This is off center but there is a feel, even in the presentation of the books, where Spitting Off Tall Buildings separates from the other two.
What do you mean?
You could sandwich Chump Change and Mooch, but Spitting Off Tall Buildings visually is presented differently.
Good, I think that’s true. I agree. It doesn’t make it bad or good, literarily. I have friends who like Spitting Off Tall Buildings better than the other two. Those other two are really intense books. Many people tell me more people that have read the books say they have read the books in one sitting than any other. They say like, reading them in 3 hours.
No, you’re right. I ripped though them in two days.
I mean you just…it is a great gift as a writer to be able to get into someone’s consciousness enough with your narrative that you hold their attention and they complete the experience. Now that’s very powerful to me.
What is that, Nicorette gum? You quit smoking?
Yeah, yeah, I know. I do a very stupid thing. I quit smoking years ago. I quit smoking in 1984, but every time I go to Europe I’m always in front of people ya know talking or reading. I smoke cigarettes for two weeks twice a year and then when I get back I quit on the airplane coming back…I love Nicorette, I am hooked on Nicorette. I’ll quit Nicorette in another month then I’ll go back to Europe. I’ll smoke for two weeks. I’m smoking, it’s my body won’t stand it any more. I smoked 60 cigarettes a day for the last ten years and I smoked for 30 years.
3 packs a day. You got to make time to smoke that much.
You have to be a mad man. What you have to do is have alot of addictions going continuous so you don’t even notice. That was the way I was.
I had read that you had not begun writing 'till you were 30 or 40. That you were then sane enough.
Yeah, yeah. It’s hard to remember the time sequence. I’ve been sober almost 16 years. During that period I didn’t even know this, alcoholism has for me, one of the sub categories of the disorder was I used to have panic attacks. I didn’t know there was that kind of label. I was about 5 to 6 years sober, and I was talking to a friend of mine on the phone. I said, “Fuck, I just can’t sit in a room." It was just like my mind goes on tilt and I just can’t do it. Unless there’s a TV on, I just can’t sit for over 10 or 15 minutes. I just don’t have an attention span. He said, you're having panic attacks. Oh, that’s what it is. So, I begin to notice that and they went away over a period of time. I find myself fascinated by writing. Writing helped me get over whatever that was. I began to sit and write. I could lose myself in what I was doing and from there I was able to, when I wasn’t writing, be in a room and be ok. So at that time I must have been 45, 44 or 45 when I started Chump Change. In 1991 I was probably 46. So I’d been sober a few years.
You can find Spitting Off Tall Buildings by Cannongate at any local bookstore.
photo by
Michael Napper