by John Fante
“I hate them,” I said.
“You!” she said. “You hate everything.”
“Look at them,” I said. “Why do they pick on those poor crabs? The crabs ain’t doing anything. Then why in the hell do they mob them like that?”
“Crabs,” she said. “Ugh.”
“I hate a sea gull,” I said. “They’ll eat anything, the deader the better.”
“For God’s sake shut up for a change. You always spoil everything. What do I care what they eat?”
In the street the little Japanese kids were having a big football game. They were all youngsters under twelve. One of them was a pretty good passer. I turned my back on the sea and watched the game. The good passer had flung another into the arms of one of his teammates. I got interested and sat up.
“Watch the sea,” Camilla said. “You’re supposed to admire beautiful things, you writer.”
“He throws a beautiful pass,” I said.
The swelling had gone from her lips, but her eye was still discolored. “I used to come here all the time,” she said. “Almost every night.”
“With that other writer,” I said. “That really great writer, that Sammy the genius.”
“He liked it here.”
“He’s a great writer, alright. That story he wrote over your left eye is a masterpiece.”
“He doesn’t talk his guts out like you. He knows when to be quiet.”
“The stupe.”
A fight was brewing between us. I decided to avoid it. I got up and walked toward the kids in the street. She asked where I was going. “I’m going to get in the game,” I said. She was outraged. “With them?” she said. “Those Japs?” I plowed through the sand.
“Remember what happened the other night!” she said.
I turned around. “What?”
“Remember how you walked home?”
“That suits me,” I said. “The bus is safer.”
The kids wouldn’t let me play because the sides were evenly numbered, but they let me referee for a while. Then the good passer’s team got so far ahead that a change was necessary, so I played on the opposite team. Everybody on our team wanted to be quarterback, and great confusion resulted. They made me play center, and I hated it because I was ineligible to receive passes. Finally the captain of our team asked me if I knew how to pass, and he gave me a chance in the tailback spot. I completed the pass. It was fun after that. Camilla left almost immediately. We played until darkness, and they beat us, but it was close. I took the bus back to Los Angeles.
Making resolutions not to see her again was useless. I didn’t know from one day to the next. There was the night two days after she left me stranded at Terminal Island. I had been to a picture show. It was after midnight when I went down the old stairway to my room. The door was locked, and from the inside. As I turned the knob I heard her call. “Just a minute. It’s me, Arturo.”
It was a long minute, five times as long as usual. I could hear her scurrying about within the room. I heard the closet door slam, heard the window being thrown open. I fumbled with the doorknob once more. She opened the door and stood there, breathless, her bosom rising and falling. Her eyes were points of black flame, her cheeks were full of blood, and she seemed alive with intense joy. I stood in a kind of fear at the change, the sudden widening and closing of her lashes, the quick wet smile, the teeth so alive and stringy with bubbled saliva.
I said, “What’s the idea?”
She threw her arms around me. She kissed me with a passion I knew was not genuine. She barred my entrance by a flourish of affection. She was hiding something from me, keeping me out of my own room as long as she could. Over her shoulder I looked around. I saw the bed with the mark of a head’s indentation upon the pillow. Her coat was flung over the chair, and the dresser was strewn with small combs and bobby pins. That was alright. Everything seemed in order except the two small red mats at the bedside. They had been moved, that was plain to me, because I liked them in their regular place, where my feet could touch them when I got out of bed in the morning.
I pulled her arms away and looked toward the closet door. Suddenly she began to pant excitedly as she backed to the door, standing against it, her arms spread to protect it. “Don’t open it, Arturo,” she pleaded. “Please!”
“What the hell is all this?” I said.
She shivered. She wet her lips and swallowed, her eyes filled with tears and she both smiled and wept. “I’ll tell you sometime,” she said. “But please don’t go in there now, Arturo. You mustn’t. Oh, you mustn’t. Please!”
“Who’s in there?”
“Nobody,” she almost shouted. “Not a soul. That isn’t it, Arturo. Nobody’s been here. But please! Please don’t open it now. Oh please!”
She came toward me, almost stalking, her arms out in an embrace that was yet a protection against my attack on the closet door. She opened her lips and kissed me with peculiar fervor, a passionate coldness, a voluptuous indifference. I didn’t like it. Some part of her was betraying some other part, but I could not find it. I sat on the bed and watched her as she stood between me and that closet door. She was trying so hard to conceal a cynical elation. She was like one who is forced to hide his drunkenness, but the elation was there, impossible to conceal.
“You’re drunk, Camilla. You shouldn’t drink so much.”
The eagerness with which she acknowledged that indeed she was drunk made me immediately suspicious. There she stood, nodding her head like a spoiled child, a coy smiling admission, the pouted lips, the look out of downcast eyes. I got up and kissed her. She was drunk, but she was not drunk on whiskey or alcohol because her breath was too sweet for that. I pulled her down on the bed beside me. Her ecstasy swept across her eyes, wave after wave of it, the passionate languor of her arms and fingers searched my throat. She crooned into my hair, her lips against my head.
“If you were only him,” she whispered. Suddenly she screamed, a piercing shriek that clawed the walls of the room. “Why can’t you be him! Oh Jesus Christ, why can’t you?” She began to beat me with her fists, pounding my head with rights and lefts, screaming and scratching in an outburst of madness against the destiny that did not make me her Sammy. I grabbed her wrists, yelled at her to be quiet. I pinned her arms and clamped my hand over her shrieking mouth. She looked out at me with bloated, protruding eyes, struggling for breath. “Not until you promise to keep quiet,” I said. She nodded and I let go. I went to the door and listened for footsteps. She lay on the bed, face down, weeping. I tiptoed toward the closet door. Instinct must have warned her. She swung around on the bed, her face soggy with tears, her eyes like crushed grapes.
“You open that door and I’ll scream,” she said. “I’ll scream and scream.”
I didn’t want that. I shrugged. She resumed her face down position and wept again. In a little while she would cry it off; then I could send her home. But it didn’t happen that way. After a half hour she was still crying. I bent over and touched her hair. “What is it you want, Camilla?”
“Him,” she sobbed. “I want to go see him.”
“Tonight?” I said. “My God, it’s a hundred and fifty miles.”
She didn’t care if it was a thousand miles, a million, she wanted to see him tonight. I told her to go ahead; that was her affair; she had a car, she could drive there in five hours.
“I want you to come with me,” she sobbed. “He doesn’t like me. He likes you, though.”
“Not me,” I said. “I’m going to bed.”
She pleaded with me. She fell on her knees before me, clung to my legs and looked up at me. She loved him so much, surely a great writer like myself understood what it was to love like that; surely I knew why she couldn’t go out there alone; and she touched the injured eye. Sammy wouldn’t drive her off if I were to come with her. He’d be grateful that she had brought me, and then Sammy and I could talk, because there was so much I could show him about writing, and he would be so grateful to me, and to he
r. I looked down at her, gritted my teeth, and tried to resist her arguments; but when she put it that way it was too much for me, and when I agreed to go I was crying with her. I helped her to her feet, dried her eyes, smoothed the hair from her face, and felt responsible for her. We tiptoed up the stairs and through the lobby to the street, where her car was parked.
We drove south and slightly east, each of us taking a turn at the wheel. By dawn we were in a land of grey desolation, of cactus and sagebrush and Joshua trees, a desert where the sand was scarce and the whole vast plain was pimpled with tumbled rocks and scarred by stumpy little hills. Then we turned off the main highway and entered a wagon trail clogged with boulders and rarely used. The road rose and fell to the rhythm of the listless hills. It was daylight when we came to a region of canyons and steep gulches, twenty miles in the interior of the Mojave Desert. There below us was where Sammy lived, and Camilla pointed to a squat adobe shack planted at the bottom of three sharp hills. It was at the very edge of a sandy plain. To the east the plain spread away infinitely.
We were both tired, hammered to exhaustion by the bouncing Ford. It was very cold at that hour. We had to park two hundred yards from the house and take a stony path to its door. I led the way. At the door I paused. Inside I could hear a man snoring heavily. Camilla hung back, her arms folded against the sharp cold. I knocked and got a groan in response. I knocked again, and then I heard Sammy’s voice. “If that’s you, you little Spick, I’ll kick your goddamn teeth out.”
He opened the door and I saw a face clutched in the persistent fingers of sleep, the eyes grey and dazed, the hair in ruins across his forehead. “Hello, Sammy.”
“Oh,” he said. “I thought it was her.”
“She’s here,” I said.
“Tell her to screw outa’ here. I don’t want her around.”
She had retreated to a place against the wall of the hut, and I looked at her and saw her smiling away her embarrassment. The three of us were very cold, our jaws chattering. Sammy opened the door wider. “You can come in,” he said. “But not her.”
I stepped inside. It was almost pitch dark, smelling of old underwear and the sleep of a sick body. A feeble light came from a crack in the window covered by a slice of sacking. Before I could stop him, Sammy had bolted the door.
He stood in long underwear. The floor was of dirt, dry and sandy and cold. He yanked the sacking from the window and the early light tumbled through. Vapors spilled from our mouths in the cold air. “Let her in, Sammy,” I said. “What the hell.”
“Not that bitch,” he said.
He stood in long underwear, the knees and elbows capped with the blackness of dirt. He was tall, gaunt, a cadaver of a man, tanned almost to blackness. He padded across the hut to a coal stove and began making a fire. His voice changed and became soft when he spoke. “Wrote another story last week,” he said. “Think I got a good one this time. Like you to see it.”
“Sure,” I said. “But hell, Sammy. She’s a friend of mine.”
“Bah,” he said. “She’s no good. Crazy as hell. Cause you nothing but trouble.”
“Let her in anyway. It’s cold out there.”
He opened the door and pushed his head out.
“Hey, you!”
I heard the girl sob, heard her try to compose herself. “Yes, Sammy.”
“Don’t stand out there like a fool,” he said. “You coming in or ain’t you?”
She entered like a frightened deer while he went back to the stove. “Thought I told you I didn’t want you hanging around here no more,” he said.
“I brought him,” she said. “Arturo. He wanted to talk to you about writing. Didn’t you, Arturo?”
“That’s right.”
She was like a stranger to me. All the fight and glory of her was drained like blood from her veins. She stood off by herself, a creature without spirit or will, her shoulder blades humped, her head drooping as though too heavy for her neck.
“You,” Sammy said to her. “Go get some wood, you.”
“I’ll go,” I said.
“Let her go,” he said. “She knows where it is.”
I watched her slink out the door. In a while she came back, her arms loaded. She dumped the sticks into a box beside the stove, and without speaking she fed the flames, a stick at a time. Sammy sat on a box across the room, pulling on his socks. He talked incessantly about his stories, a continuous flow of chatter. Camilla stood dismally beside the stove.
“You,” he said. “Make some coffee.”
She did as she was told, serving us coffee out of tin cups. Sammy, fresh from sleep, was full of enthusiasm and curiosity. We sat at the fire, and I was tired and sleepy, and the hot fire toyed with my heavy lids. Behind us and all around us, Camilla worked. She swept the place out, made up the bed, washed dishes, hung up stray garments and kept up an incessant activity. The more Sammy talked, the more cordial and personal he became. He was interested in the financial side of writing more than in writing itself. How much did this magazine pay, and how much did that one pay, and he was convinced that only by favoritism were stories sold. You had to have a cousin or a brother or somebody like that in an editor’s office before they took one of your stories. It was useless to try to dissuade him, and I didn’t try, because I knew that his kind of rationalizing was necessary in view of his sheer inability to write well.
Camilla cooked breakfast for us, and we ate from plates on our laps. The fare was fried corn meal and bacon and eggs. Sammy ate with the peculiar robustness of unhealthy people. After the meal, Camilla gathered the tin plates and washed them. Then she had her own breakfast, seated in a far corner, quiet except for the sound of her fork against the tin plate. All that long morning Sammy talked. Sammy really didn’t need any advice about writing. Vaguely through the fog of semi-slumber I heard him telling me how it should and shouldn’t be done. But I was so tired. I begged to be excused. He led me outside to an arbor of palm branches. Now the air was warm and the sun was high. I lay in the hammock and fell asleep, and the last thing I remember was the sight of Camilla bent over a wash tub filled with dark water and several pairs of underwear and overalls.
Six hours later she woke me to tell me that it was two o’clock, and that we had to start back. She was due at the Columbia Buffet at seven. I asked her if she had slept. She shook her head negatively. Her face was a manuscript of misery and exhaustion. I got off the hammock and stood up in the hot desert air. My clothes were soaked in perspiration, but I was rested and refreshed.
“Where’s the genius?” I said.
She nodded toward the hut. I walked toward the door, ducking under a long heavy clothesline sagging with clean, dry garments. “You did all of that?” I asked. She smiled. “It was fun.”
Deep snores came from the hut. I peeked inside. On the bunk lay Sammy, half naked, his mouth wide open, his arms and legs spread apart. I tiptoed away. “Now’s our chance,” I said. “Let’s go.”
She entered the hut and quietly walked to where Sammy lay. From the door I watched her lean over him, study his face and body. Then she bent down, her face near his, as if to kiss him. At that moment he awoke and their eyes met. He said: “Get out of here.”
She turned and walked out. We drove back to Los Angeles in complete silence. Even when she let me out at the Alta Loma Hotel, even then we did not speak, but she smiled her thanks and I smiled my sympathy, and she drove away. Already it was dark, a smudge of the pink sunset fading in the west. I went down to my room, yawned, and threw myself on the bed. Lying there I suddenly remembered the clothes closet. I got up and opened the closet door. Everything seemed as it should, my suits hanging from hooks, my suitcases on the top shelf. But there was no light in the closet. I struck a match and looked down at the floor. In the corner was a burned matchstick and a score of grains of brown stuff, like coarsely ground coffee. I pressed my finger into the stuff and then tasted it on the end of my tongue. I knew what that was: it was marijuana. I was sure of it, because Benn
y Cohen had once showed me the stuff to warn me against it. So that was why she had been in here. You had to have an air-tight room to smoke marijuana. That explained why the two rugs had been moved: she had used them to cover the crack under the door.
Camilla was a hophead. I sniffed the closet air, put my nostrils against the garments hanging there. The smell was that of burned cornsilk. Camilla, the hophead.
It was none of my business, but she was Camilla; she had tricked me and scorned me, and she loved somebody else, but she was so beautiful and I needed her so, and I decided to make it my business. I was waiting in her car at eleven that night.
“So you’re a hophead,” I said.
“Once in a while,” she said. “When I’m tired.”
“You cut it out,” I said.
“It’s not a habit,” she said.
“Cut it out anyway.”
She shrugged. “It doesn’t bother me.”
“Promise me you’ll quit.”
She made a cross over her heart. “Cross my heart and hope to die,” but she was talking to Arturo now, and not to Sammy. I knew she would not keep the promise. She started the car and drove down Broadway to Eighth, then south toward Central Avenue. “Where we going?” I said.
“Wait and see.”
We drove into the Los Angeles Black Belt, Central Avenue, night clubs, abandoned apartment houses, broken-down business houses, the forlorn street of poverty for the Negro and swank for the whites. We stopped under the marquee of a night spot called the Club Cuba. Camilla knew the doorman, a giant in a blue uniform with gold buttons. “Business,” she said. He grinned, signaled someone to take his place, and jumped on the running board. It was done like a routine procedure, as though it had been done before.
She drove around the corner and continued for two streets, until we came to an alley. She turned down the alley, switched off the lights and steered carefully into pitch blackness. We came to some kind of opening and killed the engine. The big Negro jumped off the running board and snapped on a flashlight, motioning us to follow. “May I ask just what the hell this is all about?” I said.
