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

by John Fante

was down on Fifth and Olive, where the big street cars chewed your ears with their noise, and the smell of gasoline made the sight of the palm trees seem sad, and

the black pavement still wet from the fog of the night before.

Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.

five weeks overdue, twenty dollars, and if I didn’t she’d hold my trunks; only I didn’t have any trunks, I only had

suitcase and it was cardboard without even a strap, because the strap was around my belly holding up my pants, and that wasn’t much of a job, because there wasn’t much left of my pants.

Oh for a Mexican girl! I used to think of her all the time, my Mexican girl. I didn’t have one, but the streets were full of them, the Plaza and Chinatown were afire with them,

they were Aztec princesses and Mayan princesses, the peon girls in the Grand Central Market, in the Church of Our Lady, and I even went to Mass to look at them.

The lean days of determination. That was the word for it, determination: Arturo Bandini in front of his typewriter two full days in succession, determined to succeed; but it didn’t work, the longest siege of hard and fast determination in his life, and not one line done, only two words written over and over

battle to the death between the palm tree and me, and the palm tree won:

I was twenty then. What the hell, I used to say, take your time, Bandini. You got ten years to write a book, so take it easy, get out and learn about life, walk the streets.

I climbed out the window and scaled the incline to the top of Bunker Hill. A night for my nose, a feast for my nose, smelling the stars, smelling the flowers, smelling the desert, and the dust asleep, across the top of Bunker Hill.

Church must go, it is the haven of the booboisie, of boobs and bounders and all brummagem mountebanks.

Almighty God, I am sorry I am now an atheist, but have You read Nietzsche? Ah, such a book! Almighty God, I will play fair in this. I will make You a proposition. Make a great writer out of me, and I will return to the Church.

the fog like a huge white animal everywhere, the

Bandini (being interviewed prior to departure for Sweden): “My advice to all young writers is quite simple. I would caution them never to evade a new experience. I would urge them to live life in the raw, to grapple with it bravely, to attack it with naked fists.”

“Aw honey, come on.” The thin bones of her face, the odor of sour wine from her mouth, the awful hypocrisy of her sweetness, the hunger for money in her eyes.

The lean days, blue skies with never a cloud, a sea of blue day after day, the sun floating through it. The days of plenty—plenty of worries, plenty of oranges. Eat them in bed, eat them for lunch, push them down for dinner. Oranges, five cents a dozen. Sunshine in the sky, sun juice in my stomach.

Sometimes an idea floated harmlessly through the room. It was like a small white bird. It meant no ill-will. It only wanted to help me, dear little bird. But I would strike at it, hammer it out across the keyboard, and it would die on my hands.

If someone only loved me, even a bug, even a mouse, but that too belonged to the past; even Pedro had forsaken me now that the best I could offer him was orange peel.

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.

Sand from the Mojave had blown across the city. Tiny brown grains of sand clung to my fingertips whenever I touched anything, and when I got back to my room I found the mechanism of my new typewriter glutted with sand. It was in my ears and in my hair. When I took off my clothes it fell like powder to

Now a good feeling rushed through me, a coolness, a newness like new skin. I spoke slowly. “Those huaraches—do you have to wear them, Camilla? Do you have to emphasize the fact that you always were and always will be a filthy little Greaser?” She looked at me in horror, her lips open.

saw a long cigaret butt. I picked it up without shame, lit it as I stood with one foot in the gutter, puffed it and exhaled toward the stars. I was an American, and goddamn proud of

From sand and cactus we Americans had carved an empire. Camilla’s people had had their

chance. They had failed. We Americans had turned the trick. Thank God for my country. Thank God I had been born an American!

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,

doomed to die in the sun, a few dollars in the bank, enough to subscribe to the Los Angeles Times, enough to keep alive the illusion that this was paradise, that their little papier-mâché homes were castles.

the folks from back home. These were my countrymen,

these were the new Californians. With their bright polo shirts and sunglasses, they were ...

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 the streets will be full of sleek women

you never will possess, and the hot semitropical nights will reek of romance you’ll never have, but you’ll still be in paradise, boys, in the land of sunshine.

was miserable, for tonight I had acted like them. Smith and Parker and Jones, I had never been one of them. Ah, Camilla! When I was a kid back home in Colorado it was Smith and Parker and Jones who hurt me with their hideous names, called me Wop and Dago and Greaser,

Camilla, when I see their faces I feel the hurt all over again, the old ache there, and sometimes I am glad they are here, dying in the sun, uprooted, 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.

have vomited at their newspapers, read their literature, observed their customs, eaten their

food, desired their women, gaped at their art.

but they are old now, dying in the sun and in the hot dust of the road, and I am young and full of hope and love for my country and my times, and 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.

“We don’t allow Mexicans in this hotel,” she said. “I’m not a Mexican. I got that title after the fable. You know: ‘And the little dog laughed to see such sport.’” “Nor Jews,” she said. I registered. I had a beautiful signature in those days, intricate, oriental, illegible, with a mighty slashing underscore, a signature more complex than that of the great Hackmuth. And after the signature I wrote, “Boulder, Colorado.”

“Boulder is in Nebraska. My husband and I went through Boulder, Nebraska, thirty years ago, on our way out here. You will kindly change that, if you please.” “But it is in Colorado! My mother lives there, my father. I went

“This hotel is no place for you, young man. We have fine people here, honest people.”

“All right,” I said. “It’s in Nebraska.” And

She was satisfied, very pleased with me, smiled and examined the magazine. “So you’re an author!” she said. “How nice!” Then she put the magazine out of sight again. “Welcome to California!” she said. “You’ll love it here!”

They always returned untouched to the neat stack on the library table.

Not even Heilman, with all his reading. Not even the landlady. I shook my head: they were very foolish, all of them.

And I thought, ah well, it was ever thus—Poe, Whitman, Heine, Dreiser, and now Bandini; thinking that, I was not so hurt, not so lonely. The name of the person who read my story was Judy, and her last name was Palmer.

She was only fourteen, with bangs of brown hair, and a red ribbon tied in a bow above her forehead.

“You read my story, didn’t you?” I said. “How did you like it?” She clutched it close to her chest and smiled. “I think it’s wonderful,” she said. “Oh, so wonderful! Mrs. Hargraves told me you wrote it. She told me you might give me a copy.”

“I’m going to give you a clean copy,” I told her. “And I’m going to autograph it. Something nice, something extra special!”

“I’m going to give you two copies,”

said. “And I’m going to autograph both of them!”

“You would make me terribly happy, Judy, if you’d read my story out loud to me. It’s never happened, and I’d like to hear it.”