by John Fante
I got out on the street and began to ask passers-by. Nobody seemed to know how to get out of San Bernardino, so I finally found it myself. I thumbed for an hour before a truck stopped. The driver wasn’t going to Los Angeles but to Wilmington. Good enough. Anything was better than San Bernardino. When I told him of being robbed and arrested he laughed. “Lotsa luck,” he said as he let me off on Wilmington Boulevard.
Wilmington was paranoid, a seaport town in the midst of war. It did not seem to have been laid out so much as dumped out. Big trucks hogged the streets, roaring through crowded intersections where soldiers, sailors and civilians ignored traffic signals in the middle of honking claxons and cursing drivers. I moved with the flow of people, aimlessly following a surge down Avalon Boulevard, I was tired, dirty and dazed, tumbled like a cork along a street of oil derricks, factories, lumberyards, piles of girders and steel pipe, row upon row of army tanks and trucks, poolhalls, poker palaces, used-car lots, and even an amusement park with a merry-go-round and a Ferris wheel. The laughter of women in bars flooded the streets. Hustlers leaned in doorways, drunks sat on the curb, smiling cops cruised in bemused attention. Where was I? Liverpool? Singapore? Marseilles? I thought of my father, how he would have loved this singular place—the gambling, the bars, the buildings shooting up on every empty piece of land.
Hunger. I smelled the tomato sauce, the pizza coming from an Italian restaurant. I turned the corner and moved down the alley to the rear of the place. As I knocked on the black screen door a cloud of flies whined away and I saw the face of an Italian woman peering out, a plump woman in her forties, round as a meatball. I’ll work for something to eat, I said. She was startled, frowning. I’m hungry, I said. She opened the door and pointed to three overloaded garbage cans, motioning me to take them outside. I rolled them out among the ecstatic flies. She worked swiftly at a butcher’s table with half a loaf of French bread split down the middle, hollowed out and filled with pastrami and cream cheese. I thanked her and said I was looking for a job. Experienced dishwasher, I said. She opened the door and invited me out. I went away down the alley to a trailer park where a black hose curled like a snake through uncut lawn, and I sat on a trailer hitch eating the sandwich and drinking warm water from the hose.
Down in the harbor a mile away I came to the Toyo Fish Company. There was a sign: WANTED: MACHINE OPERATORS, LABORERS.
Me, laborer. No hod carrier, me. No stonemason. No bricklayer. I could hear the old man: learn a trade, be something special. Oh shit, Papa. I’m not twenty yet, give me time.
The man’s name was Coletti. Dark, maybe Sicilian. Foreman of the labor gang. Paisan, I smiled. He didn’t like it. I’m looking for a job. No jobs, he said. But the sign outside said…Maybe tomorrow, he said.
I walked out into the street, heading for town, up Avalon Boulevard. But where, and why? I found a bus bench. I would call Virgil collect and ask him to send money. No, he’d tell Mama, which was okay, but the old man would find out. He’d laugh. I warned him, he’d say, he wouldn’t listen to his father.
I rose and walked again, my feet aching. I met another bum like myself. He wore a long overcoat in that hot late afternoon, the pockets stuffed with junk.
“Hey, where can I get something to eat?”
“They’s lots of restaurants,” he said.
“I’m broke.”
“So am I.”
“Where do you eat?”
“Holy Ghost Mission.”
“Where’s that?”
“Follow me.”
Holy Ghost Mission was on Banning Street between two pawnshops. It had once been a store. A crowd of thirty men, all as neatly dressed and clean-shaven as myself, crowded the door. Some sat on the sidewalk, their backs against the storefront. At seven o’clock the door opened and Mr. Atwater, a black man, told us to come inside. There was a podium where Mrs. Atwater stood, holding a guitar. We took our seats on long benches, were given hymnbooks, and Mrs. Atwater led us in songs. Then Mr. Atwater stood before us and talked about the mercy of God, the importance of faith, and the evils of drink. He was a big, soft-voiced man with a short white beard, a good and gentle man.
After the sermon we were led behind a partition to the dining area, long tables and benches, and two black ladies served us large bowls of beef stew, a hunk of bread and an apple. Everything was free, and it happened every night at seven o’clock. I sighed with relief. I had it made.
That night I slept in a used-car lot on Avalon, an old Cadillac with a velour back seat, comfortable and long enough. At eight o’clock the next morning I was back at the Toyo Fish Company standing in front of Mr. Coletti’s desk. He looked up from some papers.
“Nothing today,” he said.
“Tomorrow?”
“You never know.”
I felt encouraged. I liked Coletti. We were on talking terms, getting acquainted. Every morning I left my Cadillac and trudged down to Toyo for a brief conversation with him. There were never harsh words. Sometimes he glanced at my clothes, the gray suit I had worn since my first day in Los Angeles, rumpled now and soiled and misshapen. “Nothing doing today,” he’d say. “Things are still slow.” Then one day he let me in on a production matter. “No fish,” he said. “We’re waiting for the boats.” I felt cheered. I had been given confidential information. The job was coming. I had to hold out. Now I need not look for other jobs. God knew I had tried.
Why had I been rejected? Was it my clothes? Was it my face? I studied it in store windows, the dark stubble beard, the gaunt-ness, the aspect of defeat. Did I repel people? Did I give off some mysterious antagonism, some anger at the world? A time came when I became afraid to approach bosses and employers. Only Coletti and Mr. Atwater accepted me, gave me hope and food. I walked the streets. I found the public library and read for hours, then dropped down to the Holy Ghost Mission for my supper. I thought of begging, for I had seen panhandlers scrounging coins and it looked easy. But I lacked courage. I was too ashamed. Even those heady days when I made my way in Los Angeles washing dishes seemed impossible now.
After a month in Wilmington, Coletti came through.
“You start tomorrow. Be here at seven.”
I wanted to kiss his hand, but I only said, “Thank you.”
I walked away with my chest bursting in joy and pain, past the docks where stevedores loaded ships and men steered forklifts, laughing and kidding as they worked, and I laughed too, for I was one of them, I had a job, I belonged to the human race again. At the Holy Ghost Mission I sang with a full throat, and I cried when Mr. Atwater spoke of the mercy of God. When they passed out the gleaming red Washington apples I held mine like a holy goblet, too sacred to devour.
An old lady with a few teeth like fangs sat next to me. I smiled and said, “Would you like another apple?” She nodded with a smile and accepted my apple and put it in her paper sack. I felt ennobled. I had given something instead of taking.
It was time to sleep now, to retire and prepare for my first day on the job. As I entered my Cadillac and stretched out, the used-car manager pounced on me and ordered me out of the car. He raised a jackhandle as if to smash my skull. “Get the fuck outa here, you bum. Next time I’ll call the cops.”
When you are a drifter you take note of places to bed down—abandoned buildings, open basements, sheds. I had such a place filed away in my mind—a hideaway beneath a bridge over the Tucker River, which wasn’t a river at all except when it rained.
On the way to Tucker Bridge I stopped at the Catalina Steamship Terminal to pick up some cigarettes. The terminal was without doubt the best source of cigarettes in the harbor. It supplied the top brands—Pall Mall, Tareyton and Chesterfield—in king sizes and in ample quantities. This was the best hour to go there and stock up, for the Catalina had just returned from the island and the passengers had departed. I was not disappointed. Every sand-filled ashtray was crammed with lovely butts, and I went from one to another, selecting my favorite brands and stuffing them into my coat pockets. It
had been a good day for me. The new job, an excellent meal at Holy Ghost, and enough cigarettes to get through the following day.
A butter moon lit the harbor as I trudged through weeds and sand to the entrance of Tucker Bridge. The stream was no more than a trickle of sewer water through white sand. Someone had dragged a skiff beneath the bridge and covered it with a tarp. I rolled the canvas up and shaped it into a mattress. How beautiful it was under that bridge! Yellow moonbeams flooded both openings, and the water laughed as the tide splashed the pilings with its ebb and flow.
I lay on my back and thought of the future. Any hopes for writing would have to be postponed. What mattered now was just staying alive. From that day forward I resolved never to be poor again. I would work hard for Coletti and the Toyo Fish Company. I would hoard every penny. I would jingle coins in my pocket and store away dollars in the bank. I would cover my body, my life, with money. I would be impregnable. I would not be hurt again. I was still a young man. On December 8, a month from now, I would be twenty years old. There was plenty of time. I had everything going at last in my favor. I smiled as I said the Lord’s Prayer.
Something bit me and I wakened. Something on my leg. I sat up. Something stung my hand, the small finger. I flicked my hand. I looked. A beast, an animal, a thing, clinging to my finger. It was a brown thing. It was a crab. It hung on. I beat it against the boat. It fell away. I sat up. They were all over me. They were on my legs, under my pants, they were biting, crawling. I felt them at my scrotum. I pulled one out of my hair. I jumped up and screamed. They fell from my clothes. They made a sound of clicking. I jumped up and down. I screamed in fear. I ran out from under the bridge and tore off my clothes in the daylight. I saw the traffic. I pulled off my pants, my shirt, my shorts. I was naked, on fire, rubbing sand into little bleeding holes in my body, running like crazy, flinging myself in weeds and sand, howling like a dog. I heard a siren. I saw the spinning red light. I saw the police car roaring down, churning up sand. Two cops with batons rushed at me. “My clothes!” I said, grabbing at them—a shirt, my coat, my pants—the cops scrambling after me as I crawled on hands and knees. They picked me up by the armpits and staggered toward the police car. They opened the door and tossed me inside, the clothes in my arms. I covered my groin with the clothes and began to shake out of control as the car roared away and my teeth chattered as I kept dying and trying to stay alive.
They took me to the emergency room of the hospital, slamming to a stop in the driveway.
“Put your pants on,” the older cop said.
I fumbled with the bundle of sand-laden clothes, teeth clicking, hands shaking the loose sand on the seat and the carpet. The old cop was furious. “Watch it with that sand!” He unfolded a blanket and opened the door. He threw the blanket over me as I got out.
They marched me into the side door of the emergency room and the old cop snatched away the blanket. He threw it on the floor in disgust. The medic stared as I stood clutching my clothes.
“Got a beauty this time, Doc.” the old cop smiled.
The medic was a blond guy of about thirty in a blue smock. A fingernail gently scraped the flesh at my shoulder. The dirty skin was as greenish gray as a mackerel.
“You ever had a bath before?” the medic asked.
“I used to bathe all the time.”
“Put your clothes on the chair and follow me.”
I spilled my rags on the chair and went down the hall with him to a shower. He handed me a bar of soap and a towel. I got under the hot water. It was as close to heaven as I had ever been. It stopped the shaking and I began to see the pink of my flesh. I toweled off and walked back to the emergency room. The cops were still there, smoking and talking to the doctor. I lay on the table and he dabbed the wounds with a yellowish antiseptic as the old cop began to question me: name, address, draft status.
Quietly he asked, “How long you been doing this?”
I looked at him. “Doing what?”
“Indecent exposure.”
I sat up.
“Never!”
I was shaking again as I told about the crab attack. They were amused but not convinced. I thrust out my arms, my legs, to show the gouged flesh. The cops were not impressed.
“Could be self-inflicted,” the old cop said, turning to the doctor. “What do you think, Doc?”
My gut hardened and my eyes devoured the medic. He had been rather friendly and dispassionate, a professional but not a cop. I screamed at him.
“Tell them!”
He looked from me to the two cops, then turned back to swabbing the wounds. “I don’t believe they’re self-inflicted,” he said. “But I don’t think he was attacked by crabs either.”
I felt the grief in my chest, the turmoil to break into tears. God almighty, don’t make me cry. God keep me a man like my father!
Suddenly the old cop jumped away.
“Jesus Christ!” he said, looking down at the floor. Crawling toward him, skittering across the gleaming tile floor, was a crab. Another was moving frantically toward the crack in the door. A third crawled out of the leg of my pants, his feelers moving as he checked the strange territory. I cried then. I sat up and held my knees and cried because everybody was so fucking rotten, and the only ones coming to my rescue were the little beasties who had caused all the trouble in the first place, the crabs.
My outburst chilled the cops. They backed out of the room and returned to the squad car. Through the window I saw them sitting in the front seat, heads back, caps pulled over their eyes.
The medic washed his hands. He looked disturbed as he dried them on a towel. “Let’s have a look at those crab bites again,” he suggested, murmuring to himself as he probed here and there.
“I think I’ll give you a tetanus shot,” he said. “You ever had one?” I told him yes, a couple of years ago. Turning me over on my stomach, he jabbed a hypodermic into my butt. It hurt and I sat up.
“Is that all?”
“Not quite. I’m giving you penicillin too.”
I took it in the arm.
“Okay. You can get dressed.”
I picked up my sand-laden pants. They were obscene and disgusting as I held them in the air.
“If the cops don’t mind, I’d just as soon have their blanket.”
“I’ll fix that,” the medic said.
He walked down the hall and returned with a pair of Levi’s, a gray sweatshirt, shorts and socks. They were old but clean. I thanked him and got dressed as he chased the crabs around with a rag saturated in chloroform.
We said so long and I walked out to the police car and was driven to the Wilmington Substation of the L.A.P.D. I was booked on a charge of vagrancy. They put me in a holding cell with four other criminals, and around noon the police van hauled us to Lincoln Heights Jail in Los Angeles.
I thought of the Toyo Fish Company and all that it had promised, and how beautiful it was, rotting away there on the dock, all tin and stinking enchantingly of fish and bilge and scum and tar, and I thought fondly of Coletti, who believed in me, and I wondered if I was really as old as I felt. I looked at the other prisoners in the van. They had been arrested for brawling—their eyes blackened, some with bandaged heads and knuckles. What a sad bunch we were, riding off in the warm sunshine.
We ended our journey in the drunk tank at Lincoln Heights, an oversized cell where tired, waiting men slumped on wooden benches, shriveled in their clothes.
The next morning fifty of us were marched before the judge in Sunrise Court. When my name was called I stepped forward and pleaded guilty to the charge of vagrancy. There wasn’t much choice. Had I pleaded innocent without the necessary bail, the court would have confined me for two months while I waited for a trial date and the assignment of a public defender. The judge fined me ten dollars or five days.
The fourth morning of my term I woke to see an old acquaintance, brought in during the night. It was Crazy Hernandez, the dishwashing writer, sitting on his bunk smoking a cigarette. He
leaped at me like a beloved friend, dancing me around the cell. Hernandez was charged with marijuana possession. Not only was he charged with it, he was actually smoking it, the joint concealed in his cupped hands. That explained his enthusiasm at our reunion. Taking advantage of his euphoria, I asked him to loan me some money.
“All I got!” He pulled off his shoe, dug a bill from inside, and slapped it into my hand. A dollar. “There’s more where that came from!” he boasted. It was not so. I saw the inside of the shoe and there was nothing more within.
Oh, that Hernandez! He would never know what his dollar meant to me the morning I was sprung—a ride on the Big Red Car back to the harbor, no hitchhiking, no dread of being snatched again by the cops, a ride back to the Toyo Fish Company and my friend Coletti.
He was studying some papers at his desk.
I said, “Hi, Mr. Coletti.”
“I thought you wanted to work.”
“I was sick, in the hospital.”
“You look sick now.”
“I’m okay.”
“See Julio in the warehouse.”
Julio was the straw boss over the labor crew—ten men, six Mexicans, four Filipinos. They were loading a railroad car with cartons of canned tuna. I pitched in. They tossed those cartons as if they were basketballs, laughing and horsing around. I had to boost each one with the last of my strength. It was a long day, and when it was over I could not close my fingers.
I went back to Coletti’s office. He was slipping into his coat. “Well?”
“Could you pay me for today?”
“We don’t do that here.”
“I have to get a room.”
“Jesus, you’re a lot of trouble.”
But he gave me six dollars from the cash drawer.
10
I WAS A FAILURE at the Toyo Fish Company. A disgrace to myself. I could not pack it. The work was too much for me. At eighteen, in my last year of high school, my weight had been 160 pounds, not a big man but a solid, stumpy man with hard muscles and strong legs, a tough halfback, a swift baseball player. In the cannery it was another kind of game. The wiry Filipinos, the tireless Mexicans, made a counterfeit of me and I was ashamed, lashing myself in futility. They hoisted 100-pound sacks of rock salt with ease while I staggered with a blue face and let them slip from my grasp. They shoveled crushed ice by the hour while I rested, out of breath. My boss, Julio, observed quietly and said nothing. The other men saw it too, and pretended not to see it. They were waiting out the ordeal, waiting for me to throw in the towel. Even Coletti began to appear, watching the work from a doorway, looking a moment and then walking away. A day came when we had to clear tons of ice from the hold of a half-sunk tuna clipper. In hip boots we slushed in ice water for two days. I stopped to rest on a pile of sacks and fell asleep. Julio wakened me. The job had been finished, the ice cleared away. I was cold and shivering. Coletti wanted to see me.
