Dan Fante

---

Approaching December

You get older and your friends just begin to flop like flies

First Eddy, my closest close pal,
on that crazy bird-yellow rice rocket of his
a hundred and twenty miles an hour
his leathered knee still scraping the asphalt
after
years of body casts and punctured this and fractured that
until
I get this call from his old lady

And bottom line
splat
no more Eddy

And here, just a month ago, my buddy Bryan
not a grey hair on his head
a drooling chump for the girlies
who’s seen me through jails and three marriages
and been photographed with Bill Clinton and Ringo Starr
and who learned Spanish on the computer by himself just sos he could smuggle his ass into Cuba twice a year to romance the twenty-five-dollar-a-day brown-skinned beach Lolitas
calls me
talkin’ bout this funny ‘pinching’ sensation he’s been having in his stomach

And last Sunday we all walked single-file into a cold November desert
showering the saguaros with Bryan’s quickly cancerous ashes

And here I am
at fifty-nine
tap tap tapping away
pot-bellied
still upright and breathing on my own
fearless – a quarrelsome smart ass at the key board most days
but
other days

like today

utterly
fuckin’
alone
.....
Dan Fante was born and raised in Los Angeles. He is the author of three novels, two produced plays, and a book of poetry. His forthcoming collection of stories, SHORT DOG, will be published by Sun Dog Press in 2004. Fante lives at the beach in L.A.

---

Free Webpages at Webspawner.com

---

Send E-Mail to:

---

This page created using the webpage creation facilities of Webspawner.
Copyright © 2002 . All Rights Reserved