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

by John Fante

It seemed as if everybody was playing word-tricks, that those who said almost nothing at all were considered excellent writers.

had to go back to the pre-Revolution writers of Russia to find any gamble, any passion.

you’re a misanthrope, your whole life is doomed to celibacy, you should have been a priest, Father O’Leary talking that afternoon, telling us the joys of denial, and my own

mother’s money too, Oh Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee—until we got to the top of the stairs and walked down a dusty dark hall to a room at the end, where she turned out the light and we were inside.

was God’s most miserable creature, forced even to torturing myself. Surely upon this earth no grief was greater than mine.

I went up to my room, up the dusty stairs of Bunker Hill, past the soot-covered frame buildings along that dark street, sand and oil and grease choking the futile palm trees standing like dying prisoners, chained to a little plot of ground with black pavement hiding their feet. Dust and old

buildings and old people sitting at windows, old people tottering out of doors, old people moving painfully along the dark street. The old folk from Indiana and Iowa and Illinois, from Boston and Kansas City and Des Moines, they sold their homes and their stores, and they came here by train and by automobile to the land of sunshine, to die in the sun, with just enough money to live until the sun killed them, tore themselves out by the roots in their last days,

deserted the smug prosperity of Kansas City and Chicago and Peoria to find a place in the sun. And when they got here they found that other and greater thieves had already taken possession, that even the sun belonged to the others; Smith and Jones and Parker, druggist, banker, baker, dust of Chicago and Cincinnati and Cleveland on their shoes, doomed to d...

to keep alive the illusion that this was paradise, that their little papier-mâché homes were castles. The uprooted ones, the empty sad folks, the old and the young folks, the folks from back home. These were my countrymen, these were the new Californians. With their b...

But down on Main Street, down on Towne and San Pedro, and for a...

Street were the tens of thousands of others; they couldn’t afford sunglasses or a four-bit polo shirt and they hid in the alleys by day and slunk off to flop houses by night. A cop won’t pick you up for vagrancy in Los Angeles if you wear a fancy polo shirt and a pair of sunglasses. But if there is dust on your shoes and that sweater you wear is thick like the sw...

a pair of sunglasses, and white shoes, if you can. Be collegiate. It’ll get you anyway. After a while, after big doses of the Times and the Examiner, you too will whoop it up for the sunny south. You’ll eat hamburgers year after year and live in dusty, vermin-infested apartments and hotels, but every morning you’ll see the mighty sun, the eternal blue of the sky, and...

will reek of romance you’ll never have, but you’ll still be in paradise, boys, ...

As for the folks back home, you can lie to them, because they hate the truth anyway, they won’t have it, because soon or late they want to come out to paradise, too. You can’t fool the folks back home, boys. They know what Southern California’s like. After all they read the papers, t...

America. They’ve seen pictures of the movie stars’ homes. You can’t tell them anything about California. Lying in my bed I thought about them, watched the blobs of red light from the St. Paul Hotel jump in and out of my room, and I was miserable, for tonight I had acted like them. Smith and Parker and Jones, I had never been one o...

Jones who hurt me with their hideous names, called me Wop and Dago and Greaser, and their children hurt me, just as I hurt you tonight. They hurt me so much I could never become one of them, drove me to books, drove me within myself, drove me to run away from that Colorado town, and sometimes, Camilla, when I see their faces I feel the hurt all over a...

tricked by their heartlessness, the same faces, the same set, hard mouths, faces from my home town, fulfilling the emptiness of their lives under a blazing sun. I see them in the lobbies of hotels, I see them sunning in the parks, and limping out of ugly little churches, their faces bleak from proximity wit...

I have seen them stagger out of their movie palaces and blink their empty eyes in the face of reality once more, and stagger home, to read the Times, to find out what’s going on in the world. I have vomited at their newspapers, read their literature, observed their customs, eaten their food, desired their women, gaped at their art. But I am poor, and my ...

when I say Greaser to you it is not my heart that speaks, but the quivering of an old wound, and I am ashamed of the terrible thing I have done.

Oh Jesus, Arturo, you’re marvelous! Maybe you did write The Little Dog Laughed, but you’ll never write Casanova’s Memoirs. What are you doing, sitting here? Dreaming of some great masterpiece? Oh you fool, Bandini!

Her face was a manuscript of misery and exhaustion.

I crawled under the bed and just lay there. I did not need the sunshine anymore. Nor the earth, nor heaven. I just lay there, happy to die. Nothing else could happen to me. My life was over.