Dreams From Bunker Hill

by John Fante

  “Yes?” she said.

  I told her my name. She rose and moved to Schindler’s office door. Her dress was green velvet. Instantly I was aware of her sensational ass, a Hollywood perfecto. She moved like a snake, a large snake, a lustful boa constrictor. I was very pleased. She knocked on Schindler’s door and opened it.

  “Mr. Bandini,” she announced.

  Schindler rose from his desk and we shook hands.

  “Sit down,” he said. “Make yourself at home.”

  He was a short, bullet-shaped man with a crew cut, an unlit cigar in his mouth.

  “I’ve read all of your published stories,” he said. “You’ve got lots of style, kid. You’re just what I need. H. L. Muller strikes again!” he laughed. “We’re old friends, H. L. Muller and I. We worked on the Baltimore Sun together. I’ve known him for twenty years.”

  “I told you I’ve never written for pictures. Don’t expect too much.”

  “Leave that to me,” Schindler said.

  “Just what did you have in mind?”

  “Nothing, for the time being. First, get used to the place. Get acclimated. Get oriented. Read some of my screenplays, look at some of my films. Meet the other writers on this floor—Benchley, Ben Hecht, Dalton Trumbo, Nat West. You’re in good company, kid.”

  “Does Sinclair Lewis work here?” I asked.

  “I wish he did. Why? Do you know Lewis?”

  “He’s my favorite American writer.”

  “And a good friend of H. L. Muller,” Schindler smiled. He pushed a buzzer and the secretary came in.

  “Set Mr. Bandini up in the other office,” Schindler told her. “Arrange for him to look at some of my films, and see that he gets some of my screenplays.”

  We shook hands.

  “Good luck, Bandini. We’re going to do great things together.”

  “I hope so.”

  I turned to leave.

  “By the way,” he said, “do you two know one another?”

  I said no, and the girl said nothing.

  “Arturo,” Schindler said, “meet your secretary, Thelma Farber.”

  I smiled at her. “Hi.”

  I wasn’t sure, but I thought I saw her lip curl. She turned and walked out, and I followed the undulations of the boa constrictor in the green velvet dress. We crossed the reception room to an adjoining office. I looked around. A desk, a couple of chairs, a couch, a typewriter, some empty bookshelves.

  “Fine,” I said. “What do I do now?”

  “Suit yourself,” she said, and promptly walked out and closed the door. I wondered about her, puzzled. Then I opened the door. She was at her desk reading her novel.

  “Hey,” I said. She looked up. “Are you this friendly with everybody?”

  She smiled sweetly. “Not everybody.”

  Chapter Seven

  My assignment from Harry Schindler was an unfathomable mystery. I spent the days reading his screenplays, a dozen of them, one a day, none of which I cared for. He was a specialist in gangster films and if you looked closely you discovered that all of his scripts were essentially the same, the same plot, the same characters, the same morality. I read them and set them aside. Sometimes I left the office and wandered down the halls. On each office door I saw the nameplate of the famous—Ben Hecht, Tess Slessinger, Dalton Trumbo, Nat West, Horace McCoy, Abem Candel, Frank Edgington. Sometimes I saw these writers entering or leaving their offices. They all looked alike to me. I didn’t know them, and they didn’t know me. At lunch time one day I went upstairs to the private dining room of the elite, where writers and directors gathered. I took a seat at a long table, and found myself between John Garfield and Rowland Brown, the director. To break the ice I said to Garfield, “Please pass the salt.”

  He passed it without saying a word. I turned to Brown and asked, “You been here long?”

  “Christ, yes,” he said, and that was all. It wasn’t their fault, I decided. It was I, a social misfit, intimidated, lacking confidence. I never went back there again.

  One day walking down the fourth floor corridor I saw a man sitting behind a typewriter in Frank Edgington’s office. He was a tall Englishman, smoking a pipe.

  I said, “Are you Frank Edgington?”

  “That’s me.”

  I crossed to his desk and offered my hand.

  “I’m Arturo Bandini. I’m a writer too. I work for Harry Schindler.”

  “Welcome to the madhouse,” Edgington said.

  “What are you working on?” I asked.

  “A piece of crap. Do you know how to play pick-up-sticks?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Want to play a game?”

  “Sure.”

  He took a box of pick-up-stick pieces from his desk and we started to play. Edgington’s big bony hands were ill suited for such delicate play. I wasn’t any good either. We spent the afternoon at the game, just killing time. Edgington was an Eastern writer. He had contributed to the New Yorker and Scribner’s. He hated Hollywood. He had been in pictures for five years, loathing every moment of it.

  “Why don’t you leave here?” I asked. “If you hate it so much why don’t you go back to New York?”

  “Money. I love money.”

  We went downstairs to the drugstore and ordered cokes.

  “Are you married, Edgington?”

  “Three times,” he said.

  “You must like women very much.”

  “Not anymore. You married?”

  “No.”

  “You’re smart. Let’s get back to the game.”

  We returned to his office and played pick-up-sticks until five o’clock.

  “Let’s have dinner,” he said. “Be my guest.”

  Edgington drove a long black Cadillac. We went to Musso-Frank’s. He knew a lot of people, mostly writers. We drank a lot, Edgington putting down scotch, while I drank wine. After dinner and another two hours of liquor we were both pretty drunk. His gray eyes looked at me unsteadily.

  “Let’s get laid,” he said.

  “No, I don’t need it.”

  He was suddenly angry, and hammered the table in a drunken stupor.

  “Everybody needs it,” he shouted, turning to address people sitting at the surrounding tables. “Let’s all get fucked,” he shouted.

  Three waiters suddenly surrounded our table and hustled us out the back way and into the parking lot. Edgington dropped wearily onto a concrete slab and I sat beside him and lit a cigarette. His face twisted in a sneer.

  “God, I hate this town,” he said. “Let’s get out of here. Let’s go to New York.”

  “I don’t want to go to New York, Frank. Take me home.”

  He staggered to his feet and stumbled toward the car. I didn’t like the looks of it.

  “Are you sober enough to drive?”

  “Get in,” he said, “trust me.”

  He climbed in behind the steering wheel and I circled around to the other door and got in beside him. He bent forward, his face against the steering wheel. I waited a moment, studying him. He began to snore. He was sound asleep. I left him there, quietly slipped out, walked to Hollywood Boulevard, and took a red car to Bunker Hill.

  Frank Edgington and I became buddies. He loved the flip side of Hollywood, the bars, the mean streets angling off Hollywood Boulevard to the south. I was glad to tag along as he took in the saloons along El Centro, McCadden Place, Wilcox, and Las Palmas. We drank beer and played the pinball games. Edgington was a pinball addict, a tireless devotee, drinking beer and popping the pin-balls. Sometimes we went to the movies. He knew all the fine restaurants, and we ate and drank well. On weekends we toured the Los Angeles basin, the deserts, the foothills, the outlying towns, the harbor. One Saturday we drove to Terminal Island, a strip of white sand in the harbor. The canneries were there and we saw the weatherbeaten beach houses where Filipinos and Japanese lived. It was an enchanting place, lonely, decrepit, picturesque. I saw myself in one of the shacks with my typewriter. I longed for
the chance to work there, to write in that lonely, forsaken place, where the sand half covered the streets, and the porches and fences hung limp in the wind. I told Frank I wanted to live there and write there.

  “You’re crazy,” he said. “This is a slum.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I said. “It gives me a warm feeling.”

  At the studio we indulged another of Frank Edgington’s obsessions—child games. We played pitch, old maid, Parcheesi, and Chinese checkers. We played for small stakes—five cents a game. When Frank was alone he worked on a short story for the New Yorker. When I was alone I sat in my office hungering for Thelma Farber. She was impregnable. Sometimes she even denied me a hello, and I was thoroughly squelched and breathing hard. Harry Schindler ordered his old films and Thelma and I sat in the projection room watching them unroll. I tried to sit next to her and she promptly moved two seats away. She was a bitch, unreasonably hostile. I felt like vermin.

  After two weeks I picked up my first paycheck, $600. It was a staggering sum. Three hundred dollars a week for doing nothing! I knocked on Schindler’s door and thanked him for the check.

  “It’s okay,” he grinned. “We want you happy. That’s the whole idea.”

  “But I’m not doing anything. I’m going crazy. Give me something to write.”

  “You’re doing fine. I need you in case of emergency. I got to have a backup man, someone with talent. Don’t worry about it. You’re doing a great job. Keep up the good work. Cash the check and have fun.”

  “Let me write you a western.”

  “Not yet,” Schindler said. “Just do what you’re doing and leave the rest to me.”

  Suddenly I choked up. I wanted to cry. I turned and walked out, brushed past Thelma and into my office. I sat at my desk crying. I didn’t want charity. I wanted to be brilliant on paper, to turn fine phrases and dig up emotional gems for Schindler to see. Choking back my sobs I hurried down the hall to Edgington’s office, and flung myself into a chair.

  “What the hell’s the matter?” Edgington asked.

  I told him. “They won’t let me write,” I said. “Schindler won’t assign me anything. I’m going crazy.”

  Edgington threw his pencil across the room in disgust.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you? There are writers in this studio who go months without scratching out a line. They earn ten times as much as you do, and they laugh all the way to the bank. Your trouble is that you’re a fucking peasant. If there’s so much you don’t like about this town, stop jerking off and go back to that dago village your people came from. You make my ass tired!”

  I stared at him gratefully. Then I began to laugh.

  “Frank,” I said. “You’re a wonderful person.”

  “Go and sin no more.”

  I went downstairs to Gower Street, up to Sunset, and across Sunset to the Bank of America, where I cashed my check. I walked out with a new sensation, a feeling of bitter joy. Down Sunset half a block was a used car lot. I found a second-hand Plymouth for $300 and drove away. I was a new person, a successful Hollywood writer, without even writing a line. The future was limitless.

  Chapter Eight

  A few nights later Edgington invited me to dinner. “Best restaurant in town,” he said. We left my car in the studio parking lot and drove off in Frank’s Cadillac. He went up Beverly Boulevard to Doheny and pulled into the parking lot of an adjacent restaurant. It was Chasen’s. Before we entered Frank straightened my tie.

  “This is a high-class joint,” he said. “I don’t want you to embarrass me.”

  We walked inside. There was a small outer bar, and beyond that the main dining room. We straddled bar stools and ordered drinks. As usual Frank knew everybody. He shook hands with Dave Chasen and introduced me.

  “Nice to know you,” Chasen grinned, then turned hastily to welcome a man and two women entering from the street. They stood talking a moment.

  Frank nudged me. “Guess who’s here,” he said.

  I turned and studied the man and his two feminine companions.

  “Who’s he?” I whispered, as the trio moved past and entered the dining room.

  “Sinclair Lewis,” Frank said.

  Startled, I coughed in my drink.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “Sure I’m sure.” He beckoned to Chasen, who joined us again. “Who was the guy with the two women?” Frank asked.

  “Sinclair Lewis,” Chasen said.

  “Good God,” I said, “the greatest writer in America!” I leaped off the bar stool and crossed to the curtained door leading to the dining room. Pulling the curtain aside, I saw a waiter ushering Lewis and his friends into a booth.

  I couldn’t stop myself. All at once I was threading my way between tables toward the greatest author in America. It was a blind, crazy impulse. Suddenly I stood before Lewis’s booth. Absorbed in conversation with the women, he did not see me. I smiled at his thinning red hair, his rather freckled face, and his long delicate hands.

  “Sinclair Lewis,” I said.

  He and his friends looked up at me.

  “You’re the greatest novelist this country ever produced,” I spluttered. “All I want is to shake your hand. My name is Arturo Bandini. I write for H. L. Muller, your best friend.” I thrust out my hand. “I’m glad to know you, Mr. Lewis.”

  He fixed me with a bewildered stare, his eyes blue and cold. My hand was out there across the table between us. He did not take it. He only stared, and the women stared too. Slowly I drew my hand away.

  “It’s nice to know you, Mr. Lewis. Sorry I bothered you.” I turned in horror, my guts falling out, as I hurried between the tables and back to the bar, and joined Frank Edgington. I was raging, sick, mortified, humiliated. I snatched Frank’s Scotch and soda and gulped it down. The bartender and Frank exchanged glances.

  “Give me a pencil and paper, please.”

  The bartender put a notepad and a pencil before me. Breathing hard, the pencil trembling, I wrote:

  Dear Sinclair Lewis:

  You were once a god, but now you are a swine. I once reverenced you, admired you, and now you are nothing. I came to shake your hand in adoration, you, Lewis, a giant among American writers, and you rejected it. I swear I shall never read another line of yours again. You are an ill-mannered boor. You have betrayed me. I shall tell H. L. Muller about you, and how you have shamed me. I shall tell the world.

  Arturo Bandini

  P.S. I hope you choke on your steak.

  I folded the paper and signalled a waiter. He walked over. I handed him the note.

  “Would you please give this to Sinclair Lewis.”

  He took it and I gave him some money. He entered the dining room. I stood in the doorway watching him approach Lewis’s table. He handed Lewis the note. Lewis held it before him for some moments, then leaped to his feet, looking around, calling the waiter back. He stepped out of the booth and the waiter pointed in my direction. Carrying his napkin, Lewis took big strides as he came toward me. I shot out of there, out the front door, and down the street to the parking lot, to Frank’s Cadillac, and leaped into the back seat. I could see the street from where I sat, and in a moment Lewis appeared nervously on the sidewalk, still clutching his napkin. He glanced about, agitated.

  “Bandini,” he called. “Where are you? I’m Sinclair Lewis. Where are you, Bandini?”

  I sat motionless. A few moments, and he walked back toward the restaurant. I sat back, exhausted, bewildered, not knowing myself, or my capabilities. I sat with doubts, with shame, with torment, with regret. I lit a cigarette and sucked it greedily. In a little while Frank Edgington walked out of the restaurant and came to the car. He leaned inside and looked at me.

  “You okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What was that note you wrote?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re crazy. You want to eat?”
r />   “Not here. Let’s go someplace else.”

  “It’s up to you.” He got behind the wheel and started the engine.

  Chapter Nine

  I was born in a basement apartment of a macaroni factory in North Denver. When my father learned that his third child was also a son he reacted in the same fashion as when my two brothers came into the world—he got drunk for three days. My mother found him in the back room of a saloon down the street from our apartment and dragged him home. Beyond that my father paid little attention to me.

  One day in my infancy I stood outside the bathroom window of my aunt’s house and watched my cousin Catherine standing before the dresser mirror combing out her long red hair. She was stark naked except for her mother’s high-heeled shoes, a full-fledged woman of eight years. I did not understand the ecstasy that boiled up in me, the confusion of my cousin’s electric beauty pouring into me. I stood there and masturbated. I was five years old and the world had a new and staggering dimension.

  I was also a criminal. I felt like a criminal, a skulking, snot-nosed, freckle-faced, inscrutable criminal for four years thereafter, until sagging beneath the weight of my cross, I dragged myself into my first confession and told the priest the truth of my bestial life. He gave me absolution and I flung away the heavy cross and walked out into the sunlight, a free soul again.

  Our family moved to Boulder when I was seven and my two brothers and I attended Sacred Heart School. During the ensuing eight years I achieved high marks in baseball, basketball and football, and my life was not cluttered with books or scholarship.

  My father, a building contractor, prospered for a while in Boulder and sent me to a Jesuit high school. Most of the time I was miserable there. I got fair marks but chafed at the discipline. I hated boarding school and longed to be home, but my marks were fair and after four years I enrolled in the University of Colorado. During my second year at the university I fell in love with a girl who worked in a clothing store. Her name was Agnes, and I wanted to marry her. She moved to North Platte, Nebraska, for a better job, and I quit the university to be near her. I hitchhiked from Boulder to North Platte and arrived dusty and broke and triumphant at the rooming house where Agnes lived. We sat on the porch swing and she was not glad to see me.