Ask the Dust (The Saga of Arturo Bandini #3)

by John Fante

I don’t remember what I did after I left her. Maybe I went up to Benny Cohen’s room over the Grand Central Market. He had a wooden leg with a little door in it. Inside the door were marijuana cigarets. He sold them for fifteen cents apiece. He also sold newspapers, the Examiner and the Times. He had a room piled high with copies of The New Masses. Maybe he saddened me as always with his grim horrible vision of the world tomorrow. Maybe he poked his stained fingers under my nose and cursed me for betraying the proletariat from which I came. Maybe, as always, he sent me trembling out of his room and down the dusty stairs to the fog-dimmed street, my fingers itching for the throat of an imperialist. Maybe, and maybe not; I don’t remember. But I remember that night in my room, the lights of the St. Paul Hotel throwing red and green blobs across my bed as I lay and shuddered and dreamed of the anger of that girl, of the way she danced from table to table, and the black glance of her eyes. That I remember, even to forgetting I was poor and without an idea for a story.