Ask The Dust (6 page)

She saw me as I entered. She was glad to see me; I knew she was, because I could tell by the way her eyes widened. Her face brightened and that tight feeling caught my throat. All at once I was so happy, sure of myself, clean and conscious of my youth. I sat at that same first table. Tonight there was music in the saloon, a piano and a violin; two fat women with hard masculine faces and short haircuts. Their song was
Over the Waves.
Ta de da da, and I watched Camilla dancing with her beer tray. Her hair was so black, so deep and clustered, like grapes hiding her neck. This was a sacred 42 JOHN FANTE

place, this saloon. Everything here was holy, the chairs, the tables, that rag in her hand, that sawdust under her feet. She was a Mayan princess and this was her castle. I watched the tattered huaraches glide across the floor, and I wanted those huaraches. I would like them to hold in my hands against my chest when I fell asleep. I would like to hold them and breathe the odour of them.

She did not venture near my table, but I was glad. Don't come right away, Camilla; let me sit here a while and accustom myself to this rare excitement; leave me alone while my mind travels the infinite loveliness of your splendid glory; just leave a while to myself, to hunger and dream with eyes awake.

She came finally, carrying a cup of coffee in her tray. The same coffee, the same chipped, brownish mug. She came with her eyes blacker and wider than ever, walking towards me on soft feet, smiling mysteriously, until I thought I would faint from the pounding of my heart. As she stood beside me, I sensed the slight odour of her perspiration mingled with the tart cleanliness of her starched smock. It overwhelmed me, made me stupid, and I breathed through my lips to avoid it. She smiled to let me know she did not object to the spilled coffee of the other evening; more than that, I seemed to feel she had rather liked the whole thing, she was glad about it, grateful for it.

'I didn't know you had freckles,' she said.

'They don't mean anything,' I said.

'I'm sorry about the coffee,' she said. 'Everybody orders beer. We don't get many calls for coffee.'

'That's exactly why you don't get many calls for it. Because it's so lousy. I'd drink beer too, if I could afford it.'

She pointed at my hand with a pencil. 'You bite your fingernails,' she said. 'You shouldn't do that.'

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I shoved my hands in my pockets.

'Who are you to tell me what to do?'

'Do you want some beer?' she said. 'I'll get you some. You don't have to pay for it.'

'You don't have to get me anything. I'll drink this alleged coffee and get out of here.'

She walked to the bar and ordered a beer. I watched her pay for it from a handful of coins she dug out of her smock. She carried the beer to me and placed it under my nose. It hurt me.

'Take it away,' I said. 'Get it out of here. I want coffee, not beer.'

Someone in the rear called her name and she hurried away. The backs of her knees appeared as she bent over the table and gathered empty beer mugs. I moved in my chair, my feet kicking something under the table. It was a spittoon.

She was at the bar again, nodding at me, smiling, making a motion indicating I should drink the beer. I felt devilish, vicious. I got her attention and poured the beer into the spittoon. Her white teeth took hold of her lower lip and her face lost blood. Her eyes blazed. A pleasantness pervaded me, a satisfaction. I sat back and smiled to the ceiling.

She disappeared behind a thin partition which served as a kitchen. She reappeared, smiling. Her hands were behind her back, concealing something.

Now the old man I had seen that morning stepped from behind the partition. He grinned expectantly. Camilla waved to me. The worst was about to happen: I could feel it coming. From behind her back she revealed the little magazine containing
The Little Dog Laughed.
She waved it in the air, but she was out of view, and her performance was only for the old man and myself. He watched with big eyes. My mouth went

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dry as I saw her wet her fingers and flip the pages to the place where the story was printed. Her lips twisted as she clamped the magazine between her knees and ripped away the pages. She held them over her head, waving them and smiling. The old man shook his head approvingly. The smile on her face changed to determination as she tore the pages into little pieces, and these into smaller pieces. With a gesture of finality, she let the pieces fall through her fingers and trickle to die spittoon at her feet. I tried to smile. She slapped her hands together with an air of boredom, like one slapping the dust from her palms. Then she put one hand on her hip, tilted her shoulder, and swaggered away. The old man stood there for some time. Only he had seen her. Now that the show was over, he disappeared behind the partition.

I sat smiling wretchedly, my heart weeping for
The Little Dog Laughed,
for every well-turned phrase, for the little flecks of poetry through it, my first story, the best thing I could show for my whole life. It was the record of all that was good in me, approved and printed by the great J. C. Hackmuth, and she had torn it up and thrown it into a spittoon.

After a while I pushed back my chair and got up to leave. Standing at the bar, she watched me go. There was pity for me upon her face, a tiny smile of regret for what she had done, but I kept my eyes away from her and walked into the street, glad for the hideous din of street cars and the queer noises of the city pounding my ears and burying me in an avalanche of banging and screeching. I put my hands in my pockets and slumped away.

Fifty feet from the saloon I heard someone calling. I turned around. It was she, running on soft feet, coins jingling in her pockets. 'Young fellow!' she called. 'Oh kid!'

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I waited and she came out of breath, speaking quickly and softly. 'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I didn't mean anything — honest.'

'It's okay,' I said. 'I didn't mind.'

She kept glancing towards the saloon. 'I have to get back,' she said. 'They'll miss me. Come back tomorrow night, will you? Please! I can be nice. I'm awfully sorry about tonight. Please come, please!' She squeezed my arm. 'Will you come?' 'Maybe.'

She smiled. 'Forgive me?' 'Sure.'

I stood in the middle of the sidewalk and watched her hurry back. After a few steps she turned, blew a kiss and called, 'Tomorrow night. Don't forget!'

'Camilla!' I said. 'Wait. Just a minute!' We ran towards each other, meeting halfway. 'Hurry!' she said. 'They fire me.'

I glanced at her feet. She sensed it coming and I felt her recoiling from me. 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. Clasping both hands against her mouth, she rushed inside the saloon. I heard her moaning. 'Oh, oh, oh.'

I tossed my shoulders and swaggered away, whistling with pleasure. In the gutter I saw a long cigarette butt. I picked it up without shame, lit it as I stood with one foot in the gutter, puffed it and exhaled towards the stars. I was an American, and goddamn proud of it. This great city, these mighty pavements and proud buildings, they were the voice of my America. 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!

46 JOHN FANTE

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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 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-mache 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 ASK THE DUST

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their bright polo shirts and sunglasses, they were in paradise, they belonged.

But down on Main Street, down on Towne and San: Pedro, and for a mile on lower Fifth 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 sweaters they wear in the snow countries, he'll grab you. So get yourselves a polo shirt boys, and 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 the streets will be full of sleek women you never will possess, and the hot semi-tropical nights will reek of romance, you'll never have, but you'll still be in paradise, boys, in the land of sunshine.

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, they look at the picture magazine glutting the newsstands of every corner in 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 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, 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 again, the old ache there, and sometimes 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 with their strange gods, out of Aimee's Temple, out of the Church of the Great I Am.

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 name ends with a soft vowel, and they hate me and my father, and my father's father, and they would have my blood and put me down, 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.

50 JOHN
FANTE

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I am thinking of the Alta Loma Hotel, remembering the people who lived there. I remember my first day there. I remember that I walked into the dark lobby carrying two suitcases, one of them filled with copies of
The Little Dog Laughed.

It was a long time ago, but I remember it well. I had come by bus, dusty to the skin, the dust of Wyoming and Utah and Nevada in my hair and in my ears.

'I want a cheap room,' I said.

The landlady had white hair. Around her neck was a high net collar fitting tightly like a corset. She was in her seventies, a tall woman who increased her height by rising on tiptoe and peering at me over her glasses.

'Do you have a job?' she said.

'I'm a writer,' I said. 'Look, I'll show you.'

I opened my suitcase and got out a copy. 'I wrote that,' I told her. I was eager in those days, very proud. 'I'll give you a copy,' I said. 'I'll autograph it for you.'

I took a fountain pen from the desk, it was dry and I had to dip it, and I rolled my tongue around thinking of something nice to say. 'What's your name?' I asked her. She told me unwillingly. 'Mrs Margraves,' she said. 'Why?' But I was honouring her, and I had no time to answer questions, and I wrote above the story, 'For a woman of ineffable charm,

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with lovely blue eyes and a generous smile, from the author, Arturo Bandini.'

She smiled with a smile that seemed to hurt her face, cracking it open with old lines that broke up the dry flesh around her mouth and cheeks. 'I hate dog stories,' she said, putting the magazine out of sight. She looked at me from an even higher view over her glasses. 'Young man,' she said, 'are you a Mexican?'