The John Fante Reader

by John Fante

  I told her to laugh if she felt like it but some day she would change her tune, and I took my new books and magazines to my private study, which was the clothes closet. There was no electric light in it, so I used candles. There was a feeling in the air that someone or something had been in the study while I was away. I looked around, and I was right, for my sister’s little pink sweater hung from one of the clothes hooks.

  I lifted it off the hook and said to it, “What do you mean by hanging there? By what authority? Don’t you realize you have invaded the sanctity of the house of love?” I opened the door and threw the sweater on the divan.

  “No clothes allowed in this room!” I yelled.

  My mother came in a hurry. I closed the door and flipped the lock. I could hear her footsteps. The door knob rattled. I started unwrapping the package. The pictures in Artists and Models were honeys. I picked my favorite. She was lying on a white rug, holding a red rose to her cheek. I set the picture between the candles on the floor and got down on my knees. “Chloe,” I said, “I worship you. Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep on Mount Gilead, and thy cheeks are comely. I am thy humble servant, and I bringeth love everlasting.”

  “Arturo!” my mother said. “Open up.”

  “What do you want?”

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Reading. Perusing! Am I denied even that in my own home?”

  She rattled the buttons of the sweater against the door. “I don’t know what to do with this,” she said. “You’ve got to let me have this clothes closet.”

  “Impossible.”

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Reading.”

  “Reading what?”

  “Literature!”

  She wouldn’t go away. I could see her toes under the door crack. I couldn’t talk to the girl with her standing out there. I put the magazine aside and waited for her to go away. She wouldn’t. She didn’t even move. Five minutes passed. The candle spluttered. The smoke was filling the place again. She hadn’t moved an inch. Finally I set the magazine on the floor and covered it with a box. I felt like yelling at my mother. She could at least move, make a noise, lift her foot, whistle. I picked up a fiction book and stuck my finger in it, as if marking the place. When I opened the door she glared at my face. I had a feeling she knew all about me. She put her hands on her hips and sniffed at the air. Her eyes looked everywhere, the comers, the ceiling, the floor.

  “What on earth are you doing in there?”

  “Reading! Improving my mind. Do you forbid even that?”

  “There’s something awfully strange about this,” she said. “Are you reading those nasty picture books again?”

  “I’ll have no Methodists, prudes, or pruriency in my house. I’m sick of this polecat wowserism. The awful truth is that my own mother is a smut hound of the worst type.”

  “They make me sick,” she said.

  I said, “Don’t blame the pictures. You’re a Christian, an Epworth Leaguer, a Bible-Belter. You’re frustrated by your brummagem Christianity. You’re at heart a scoundrel and a jackass, a bounder and an ass.”

  She pushed me aside and walked into the closet. Inside was the odor of burning wax and brief passions spent on the floor. She knew what the darkness held. Then she ran out.

  “God in heaven!” she said. “Let me out of here.” She pushed me aside and slammed the door. I heard her banging pots and pans in the kitchen. Then the kitchen door slammed. I locked the door and went back to the picture and lit the candles. After a while my mother knocked and told me supper was ready. I told her I had eaten. She hovered at the door. She was getting annoyed again. I could feel it coming on. There was a chair at the door. I heard her drag it into position and sit down. I knew she sat with folded arms, looking at her shoes, her feet straight out in that characteristic way she had of sitting and waiting. I closed the magazine and waited. If she could stand it I could too. Her toe beat a tap on the carpet. The chair squeaked. The beat increased. All at once she jumped up and started hammering the door. I opened it in a hurry.

  “Come out of there!” she screamed.

  I got out as fast as I could. She smiled, tired but relieved. She had small teeth. One below was out of line like a soldier out of step. She wasn’t more than five three but she looked tall when she had on high heels. Her aged showed most in her skin. She was forty-five. Her skin sagged some under the ears. I was glad her hair wasn’t grey. I always looked for grey hairs but didn’t find any. I pushed her and tickled her and she laughed and fell into the chair. Then I went to the divan and stretched out and slept awhile.

  —The Road to Los Angeles

  THEY WENT TO BED. I had the divan and they had the bedroom. When their door closed I got out the magazines and piled into bed. I was glad to be able to look at the girls under the lights of the big room. It was a lot better than that smelly closet. I talked to them about an hour, went into the mountains with Elaine, and to the South Seas with Rosa, and finally in a group meeting with all of them spread around me, I told them I played no favorites and that each in her turn would get her chance. But after a while I got awfully tired of it, for I got to feeling more and more like an idiot until I began to hate the idea that they were only pictures, flat and single-faced and so alike in color and smile. And they all smiled like whores. It all got very hateful and I thought, Look at yourself! Sitting here and talking to a lot of prostitutes. A fine superman you turned out to be! What if Nietzsche could see you now? And Schopenhauer—what would he think? And Spengler! Oh, would Spengler roar at you! You fool, you idiot, you swine, you beast, you rat, you filthy, contemptible, disgusting little swine! Suddenly I grabbed the pictures up in a batch and tore them to pieces and threw them down the bowl in the bathroom. Then I crawled back to bed and kicked the covers off. I hated myself so much that I sat up in bed thinking the worst possible things about myself. Finally I was so despicable there was nothing left to do but sleep. It was hours before I dozed off. The fog was thinning in the east and the west was black and grey. It must have been three o’clock. From the bedroom I heard my mother’s soft snores. By then I was ready to commit suicide, and so thinking I fell asleep.

  —The Road to Los Angeles

  WHEN I WOKE UP IT was around noon and they were gone somewhere. I got out the picture of an old girl of mine I called Marcella and we went to Egypt and made love in a slave-driven boat on the Nile. I drank wine from her sandals and milk from her breasts and then we had the slaves paddle us to the river bank and I fed her hearts of hummingbirds seasoned in sweetened pigeon milk. When it was over I felt like the devil. I felt like hitting myself in the nose, knocking myself unconscious. I wanted to cut myself, to feel my bones cracking. I tore the picture of Marcella to pieces and got rid of it and then I went to the medicine cabinet and got a razor blade, and before I knew it I slit my arm below the elbow, but not deeply so that it was only blood and no pain. I sucked the slit but there was still no pain, so I got some salt and rubbed it in and felt it bite my flesh, hurting me and making me come out of it and feel alive again, and I rubbed it until I couldn’t stand it any longer. Then I bandaged my arm.

  They had left a note for me on the table. It said they had gone to Uncle Frank’s and that there was food in the pantry for my breakfast. I decided to eat at jim’s Place, because I still had some money. I crossed the schoolyard which was across the street from the apartment and went over to jim’s. I ordered ham and eggs. While I ate Jim talked.

  He said, “You read a lot. Did you ever try writing a book?”

  That did it. From then on I wanted to be a writer. “I’m writing a book right now,” I said.

  He wanted to know what kind of a book.

  I said, “My prose is not for sale. I write for posterity.”

  He said, “I didn’t know that. What do you write? Stories? Or plain fiction?”

  “Both. I’m ambidextrous.”

  “Oh. I didn’t know that.”

  I went over to the other side of the pla
ce and bought a pencil and a notebook. He wanted to know what I was writing now. I said, “Nothing. Merely taking random notes for a future work on foreign trade. The subject interests me curiously, a sort of dynamic hobby I’ve picked up.”

  When I left he was staring at me with his mouth open. I took it easy down to the harbor. It was June down there, the best time of all. The mackerel were running off the south coast and the canneries were going full blast, night and day, and all the time at that time of the year there was a stink in the air of putrefaction and fish oil. Some people considered it a stink and some got sick from it, but it was not a stink to me, except the fish smell which was bad, but to me it was great. I liked it down there. It wasn’t one smell but a lot of them weaving in and out, so every step you took brought a different odor. It made me dreamy and I did a lot of thinking about far-away places, the mystery of what the bottom of the sea contained, and all the books I’d read came alive at once and I saw better people out of books, like Philip Carey, Eugene Witla, and the fellows Dreiser made.

  I liked the odor of bilge water from old tankers, the odor of crude oil in barrels bound for distant places, the odor of oil on the water turned slimy and yellow and gold, the odor of rotting lumber and the refuse of the sea blackened by oil and tar, of decayed fruit, of little Japanese fishing sloops, of banana boats and old rope, of tugboats and scrap iron and the brooding mysterious smell of the sea at low tide.

  I stopped at the white bridge that crossed the channel to the left of the Pacific Coast Fisheries on the Wilmington side. A tanker was unloading at the gasoline docks. Up the street Jap fishermen were repairing their nets, stretched for blocks along the water’s edge. At the American-Hawaiian stevedores were loading a ship for Honolulu. They worked in their bare backs. They looked like something great to write about. I flattened the new notebook against the rail, dipped the pencil on my tongue and started to write a treatise on the stevedore: “A Psychological Interpretation of the Stevedore Today and Yesterday, by Arturo Gabriel Bandini.”

  It turned out a tough subject. I tried four or five times but gave up. Anyhow, the subject took years of research; there wasn’t any need for prose yet. The first thing to do was get my facts together. Maybe it would take two years, three, even four; in fact it was the job of a lifetime, a magnum opus. It was too tough. I gave it up. I figured philosophy was easier.

  “A Moral and Philosophical Dissertation on Man and Woman, by Arturo Gabriel Bandini.” Evil is for the weak man, so why be weak. It is better to be strong than to be weak, for to be weak is to lack strength. Be strong, my brothers, for I say unless ye be strong the forces of evil shall get ye. All strength is a form of power. All lack of strength is a form of evil. All evil is a form of weakness. Be strong, lest ye be weak. Avoid weakness that ye might become strong. Weakness eateth the heart of woman. Strength feedeth the heart of man. Do ye wish to become females? Aye, then grow weak. Do ye wish to become men? Aye, aye. Then grow strong. Down with Evil! Up with Strength! Oh Zarathustra, endow thy women with plenty of weakness! Oh Zarathustra, endow thy men with plenty of strength! Down with woman! Hail Man!

  Then I got tired of the whole thing. I decided maybe I wasn’t a writer after all but a painter. Maybe my genius lay in art. I turned a page in the book and figured on doing some sketching just for the practice, but I couldn’t find anything worth drawing, only ships and stevedores and docks, and they didn’t interest me. I drew cats-on-the-fence, faces, triangles and squares. Then I got the idea I wasn’t an artist or a writer but an architect, for my father had been a carpenter and maybe the building trade was more in keeping with my heritage. I drew a few houses. They were about the same, square places with a chimney out of which smoke poured. I put the notebook away.

  It was hot on the bridge, the heat stinging the back of my neck. I crawled through the rail to some jagged rocks tumbled about at the edge of the water. They were big rocks, black as coal from immersions at high tide, some of them big as a house. Under the bridge they were scattered in crazy disorder like a field of icebergs, and yet they looked contented and undisturbed.

  I crawled under the bridge and I had a feeling I was the only one who had ever done it. The small harbor waves lapped at the rocks and left little pools of green water here and there. Some of the rocks were draped in moss, and others had pretty spots of bird dung. The ponderous odor of the sea came up. Under the girders it was so cold and so dark I couldn’t see much. From above I heard the traffic pounding, horns honking, men yelling, and big trucks battering the timber crosspieces. It was such a terrible din that it hammered my ears and when I yelled my voice went out a few feet and rushed back as if fastened to a rubber band. I crawled along the stones until I got out of the range of the sunlight. It was a strange place. For a while I was scared. Farther on there was a great stone, bigger than the rest, its crest ringed with the white dung of gulls. It was the king of all those stones with a crown of white. I started for it.

  All of a sudden everything at my feet began to move. It was the quick slimy moving of things that crawled. I caught my breath, hung on, and tried to fix my gaze. They were crabs! The stones were alive and swarming with them. I was so scared I couldn’t move and the noise from above was nothing compared to the thunder of my heart.

  I leaned against a stone and put my face in my hands until I wasn’t afraid. When I took my hands away I could see through the blackness and it was grey and cold, like a world under the earth, a grey, solitary place. For the first time I got a good look at the things living down there. The big crabs were the size of house bricks, silent and cruel as they held forth on top the large stones, their menacing antennae moving sensuously like the arms of a hula dancer, their little eyes mean and ugly. There were a lot more of the smaller crabs, about the size of my hand, and they swam around in the little black pools at the base of the rocks, crawling over one another, pulling one another into the lapping blackness as they fought for positions on the stones. They were having a good time.

  There was a nest of even smaller crabs at my feet, each the size of a dollar, a big chunk of squirming legs jumbled together. One of them grabbed my pants cuff. I pulled him off and held him while he clawed helplessly and tried to bite me. I had him though and he was helpless. I pulled back my arm and threw him against a stone. He crackled, smashed to death, stuck for a moment upon the stone, then falling with blood and water exuding. I picked up the smashed shell and tasted the yellow fluid coming from it, which was salty as sea water and I didn’t like it. I threw him out to deep water. He floated until a jack smelt swam around him and examined him, and then began to bite him viciously and finally dragged him out of sight, the smelt slithering away. My hands were bloody and sticky and the smell of the sea was on them. All at once I felt a swelling in me to kill these crabs, every one of them.

  The small ones didn’t interest me, it was the big ones I wanted to kill and kill. The big fellows were strong and ferocious with powerful incisors. They were worthy adversaries for the great Bandini, the conquering Arturo. I looked around but couldn’t find a switch or a stick. On the bank against the concrete there was a pile of stones. I rolled up my sleeves and started throwing them at the largest crab I could see, one asleep on a stone twenty feet away. The stones landed all around him, within an inch of him, sparks and chips flying, but he didn’t even open his eyes to find out what was going on. I threw about twenty times before I got him. It was a triumph. The stone crushed his back with the sound of a breaking soda cracker. It went clear through him, pinning him to the stone. Then he fell into the water, the foamy green bubbles at the edge swallowing him. I watched him disappear and shook my fist at him, waving angry farewells as he floated to the bottom. Goodbye, goodbye! We will doubtless meet again in another world; you will not forget me, Crab. You will remember me forever and forever as your conqueror!

  Killing them with stones was too tough. The stones were so sharp they cut my fingers when I heaved them. I washed the blood and slime off my hands and made my way to the edge a
gain. Then I climbed onto the bridge and walked down the street to a ship chandler’s shop three blocks away, where they sold guns and ammunition.

  I told the white-faced clerk I wanted to buy an air gun. He showed me a high powered one and I laid the money down and bought it without questions. I spent the rest of the ten on ammunition—BB shot. I was anxious to get back to the battlefield so I told white face not to wrap the ammunition but give it to me like that. He thought that was strange and he looked me over while I scooped the cylinders off the counter and left the shop as fast as I could but not running. When I got outside I started to run, and then I sensed somebody was watching me and I looked around, and sure enough white face was standing in the door and peering after me through the hot afternoon air. I slowed down to a fast walk until I got to the corner and then I started to run again.

  I shot crabs all that afternoon, until my shoulder hurt behind the gun and my eyes ached behind the gunsight. I was Dictator Bandini, Ironman of Crabland. This was another Blood Purge for the good of the Fatherland. They had tried to unseat me, those damned crabs, they had had the guts to try to foment a revolution, and I was getting revenge. To think of it! It infuriated me. These goddamned crabs had actually questioned the might of Superman Bandini! What had got into them to be so stupidly presumptuous? Well, they were going to get a lesson they would never forget. This was going to be the last revolution they’d ever attempt, by Christ. I gnashed my teeth when I thought of it—a nation of revolting crabs. What guts! God, I was mad.

  I pumped shot until my shoulder ached and a blister rose on my trigger finger. I killed over five hundred and wounded twice as many. They were alive to the attack, insanely angry and frightened as the dead and wounded dropped from the ranks. The siege was on. They swarmed toward me. Others came out of the sea, still others from behind rocks, moving in vast numbers across the plain of stones toward death who sat on a high rock out of their reach.