Free Chump Change by Dan Fante

and started folding it forward, the way a deli guy rolls up a sandwich in waxed paper.
    I was about to leave with Rocco and the wrapped gopher as a lure, when a perversity grasped my brain. Across the room I recognized my wife’s purse among the other handbags. I remembered that, in a wallet inside the purse, she kept several credit cards which still bore the raised letters that spelled out the name Mr. and Mrs. Bruno Dante. It was true that our marriage was over. That was what made it easy to convince myself that the one final accommodation—the use of a credit card from her purse—would be my last requirement of her as a wife. The reasoning for the act was simple, it was: “fuck her.”
    I opened the purse and sorted through the wallet with the see-through plastic sleeves where she kept all her credit cards, until I found a bright gold new VISA CARD among the others. I slipped it into the top pocket of my jacket.
    As I returned the wallet to the handbag, another idea came to me. I should leave her an exchange, a memento, something for something. So into the purse, I dropped the towel containing Rocco’s gopher. Then, with my index finger and thumb, I pulled a corner of the towel that forced the clothto unravel dumping the smelly little body into the center of the bag. She and the PE Teacher boyfriend could use it as a dildo.
    Getting Rocco back out to Fabrizio’s car without the gopher was not too difficult, since I had bypassed trying to get him to cooperate. I just carried him.
    We traveled over halfway to the garage until he got too heavy. Then I took a clean sheet from a linen cart and fashioned it into a kind of harness around his neck. I was then able to pull and haul him the rest of the way into the garage.
    I had never stolen anything from my brother before. I told myself that as soon as the dog and I had a room someplace, that I would call Fabrizio and let him know where to pick up the car.

9
    L.A.’ S WEATHER IN D ECEMBER IS PARTICULARLY NUTS. T HE night had brought in more dry Santa Ana winds from the desert. The last few years, at Christmas time, people drive to the canyons to start fires hoping to burn the city down and see the disaster they’ve caused reported on the TV news that night.
    As I left the hospital parking lot, great waves of black dust splashed tree branches and brittle shards of paper bags against the windshield of the Ford. I found Santa Monica Boulevard and headed west in search of an open liquor store, while Rocco dozed on the seat next to me. I wanted only to be numb and buying two bottles of Mogen David Mad Dog 20-20, would make sure I got there.
    For hours after the liquor store, I glided along the near empty side streets and dark avenues with my head sorting and clicking through impulses and conclusions. The more gulps ofMad Dog I consumed, the more reasonable my thoughts became. I wanted only the aloneness and the humming of the tires.
    By the end of the first bottle I was okay. I’d made it to sundown.
    I got to Ocean Avenue and the beach and turned left to Venice Boulevard, then left again heading back toward downtown, continuing to let the world blow by in silence. From time to time, great gusts of hot air like giant cotton balls thumped the car in the darkness.
    At Sepulveda, I went north again toward the mountains, until I crossed Pico and felt the tires hit what still remained of the shiny tracks from where the old trains had run. The rails popped up in places through the worn asphalt. The moonlight would hit the exposed metal for a few yards at a time, then the tracks would disappear back under the pavement, like the backs of eels gliding beneath the surface.
    I drove more. Another ten miles. Fifteen. This time taking Olympic Boulevard downtown and back, passing “Nickel Street,” City Hall and Chinatown.
    Near Venice Boulevard and La Cienega was a mini-mart liquor store. Rocco was awake and antsy so I pulled into the parking lot assuming that he was hungry.
    A young