Ask the Dust

by John Fante

  We entered a door. The Negro took the lead. He held Camilla’s hand, and she held mine. We walked down a long corridor. It was carpetless, a hardwood floor. Far away like frightened birds, the echo of our feet floated through the upper floors. We climbed three flights of stairs and proceeded the length of another hall. At the end was a door. The Negro opened it. Inside was complete darkness. We entered. The room reeked with smoke that could not be seen, and yet it burned like an eyewash. The smoke choked my throat, leaped for my nostrils. In the darkness I swallowed for breath. Then the Negro flashed on his light.

  The beam traveled around the room, a small room. Everywhere were bodies, the bodies of Negroes, men and women, perhaps a score of them, lying on the floor and across a bed that was only a mattress on springs. I could see their eyes, wide and grey and oyster-like as the flashlight hit them, and gradually I accustomed myself to the burning smoke and saw tiny red points of light everywhere, for they were all smoking marijuana, quietly in the darkness, and the pungency stabbed my lungs. The big Negro cleared the bed of its occupants, flung them like so many sacks of grain to the floor, and the flash spot revealed him digging something from a slot in the mattress. It was a Prince Albert tobacco can. He opened the door, and we followed him down the stairs and through the same darkness to the car. He handed the can to Camilla, and she gave him two dollars. We drove him back to his doorman’s job, and then we continued down Central Avenue to metropolitan Los Angeles.

  I was speechless. We drove to her place on Temple Street. It was a sick building, a frame place diseased and dying from the sun. She lived in an apartment. There was a Murphy bed, a radio, and dirty blue overstuffed furniture. The carpeted floor was littered with crumbs and dirt, and in the corner, sprawled out like one naked, lay a movie magazine. There were kewpie dolls standing about, souvenirs of gaudy nights at beach resorts. There was a bicycle in the corner, the flat tires attesting to long disuse. There was a fishing pole in one corner with tangled hooks and line, and there was a shotgun in the other corner, dusty. There was a baseball bat under the divan, and there was a bible lodged between the cushions of the overstuffed chair. The bed was down, and the sheets were not clean. There was a reproduction of the Blue Boy on one wall and a print of an Indian Brave saluting the sky on another.

  I walked into the kitchen, smelled the garbage in the sink, saw the greasy frying pans on the stove. I opened the Frigidaire and it was empty save for a can of condensed milk and a cube of butter. The icebox door would not close, and that seemed as it should be. I looked into the closet behind the Murphy bed and there were lots of clothes and lots of clothes-hooks, but all the clothes were on the floor, except a straw hat, and that hung alone, ridiculous up there by itself.

  So this was where she lived! I smelled it, touched it with my fingers, walked through it with my feet. It was as I had imagined. This was her home. Blindfolded I could have acknowledged the place, for her odor possessed it, her fevered, lost existence proclaimed it as part of a hopeless scheme. An apartment on Temple Street, an apartment in Los Angeles. She belonged to the rolling hills, the wide deserts, the high mountains, she would ruin any apartment, she would lay havoc upon any such little prison as this. It was so, ever in my imagination, ever a part of my scheming and thinking about her. This was her home, her ruin, her scattered dream.

  She threw off her coat and flung herself on the divan. I watched her stare dismally at the ugly carpet. Sitting in the overstuffed chair, I puffed a cigaret and let my eyes wander the profile of her curved back and hips. The dark corridor of that Central Avenue Hotel, the sinister Negro, the black room and the hopheads, and now the girl who loved a man who hated her. It was all of the same cloth, perverse, drugged in fascinating ugliness. Midnight on Temple Street, a can of marijuana between us. She lay there, her long fingers dangling to the carpet, waiting, listless, tired.

  “Have you ever tried it?” she asked.

  “Not me,” I said.

  “Once won’t hurt you.”

  “Not me.”

  She sat up, fumbled for the can of marijuana in her purse. She drew out a packet of cigaret papers. She poured a paperful, rolled it, licked it, pinched the ends, and handed it to me. I took it, and yet I said, “Not me.”

  She rolled one for herself. Then she arose and closed the windows, clamped them tightly by their latches. She dragged a blanket off the bed and laid it against the crack of the door. She looked around carefully. She looked at me. She smiled. “Everybody acts different,” she said. “Maybe you’ll feel sad, and cry.”

  “Not me,” I said.

  She lit hers, held the match for mine.

  “I shouldn’t be doing this,” I said.

  “Inhale,” she said. “Then hold it. Hold it a long time. Until it hurts. Then let it out.”

  “This is bad business,” I said.

  I inhaled it. I held it. I held it a long time, until it hurt. Then I let it out. She lay back against the divan and did the same thing. “Sometimes it takes two of them,” she said.

  “It won’t affect me,” I said.

  We smoked them down until they burned our fingertips. Then I rolled two more. In the middle of the second it began to come, the floating, the wafting away from the earth, the joy and triumph of a man over space, the extraordinary sense of power. I laughed and inhaled again. She lay there, the cold languor of the night before upon her face, the cynical passion. But I was beyond the room, beyond the limits of my flesh, floating in a land of bright moons and blinking stars. I was invincible. I was not myself, I had never been that fellow with his grim happiness, his strange bravery. A lamp on the table beside me, and I picked it up and looked at it, and dropped it to the floor. It broke into many pieces. I laughed. She heard the noise, saw the ruin, and laughed too.

  “What’s funny?” I said.

  She laughed again. I got up, crossed the room, and took her in my arms. They felt terribly strong and she panted at their crush and desire.

  I watched her stand and take off her clothes, and somewhere out of an earthly past I remembered having seen that face of hers before, that obedience and fear, and I remembered a hut and Sammy telling her to go out and get some wood. It was as I knew it was bound to be sooner or later. She crept into my arms and I laughed at her tears.

  When it was all gone, the dream of floating toward bursting stars, and the flesh returned to hold my blood in its prosaic channels, when the room returned, the dirty sordid room, the vacant meaningless ceiling, the weary wasted world, I felt nothing but the old sense of guilt, the sense of crime and violation, the sin of destruction. I sat beside her as she lay on the divan. I stared at the carpet. I saw the pieces of glass from the broken lamp. And when I got up to walk across the room, I felt the pain, the sharp agony of the flesh of my feet torn by my own weight. It hurt with a deserving pain. My feet were cut when I put on my shoes and walked out of that apartment and into the bright astonishment of the night. Limping, I walked the long road to my room. I thought I would never see Camilla Lopez again.

  Chapter Seventeen

  But big events were coming, and I had no one to whom I could speak of them. There was the day I finished the story of Vera Rivken, the breezy days of rewriting it, just coasting along, Hackmuth, a few more days now and you’ll see something great. Then the revision was finished and I sent it away, and then the waiting, the hoping. I prayed once more. I went to mass and Holy Communion. I made a novena. I lit candles at the Blessed Virgin’s altar. I prayed for a miracle.

  The miracle happened. It happened like this: I was standing at the window in my room, watching a bug crawling along the sill. It was three-fifteen on a Thursday afternoon. There was a knock on my door. I opened the door, and there he stood, a telegraph boy. I signed for the telegram, sat on the bed, and wondered if the wine had finally got the Old Man’s heart. The telegram said: your book accepted mailing contract today. Hackmuth. That was all. I let the paper float to the carpet. I just sat there. Then I got down on the floor and began kissing the
telegram. I crawled under the bed and just lay there. I did not need the sunshine anymore. Nor the earth, nor heaven. I just lay there, happy to die. Nothing else could happen to me. My life was over.

  Was the contract coming via air mail? I paced the floor those next days. I read the papers. Air mail was too impractical, too dangerous. Down with the air mail. Every day planes were falling, covering the earth with wreckage, killing pilots: it was too damned unsafe, a pioneering venture, and where the hell was my contract? I called the post office. How were flying conditions over the Sierras? Good. All planes accounted for? Good. No wrecks? Then where was my contract? I spent a long time practicing my signature. I decided to use my middle name, the whole thing Arturo Dominic Bandini, A. D. Bandini, Arturo D. Bandini, A. Dominic Bandini. The contract came Monday morning, first class mail. With it was a check for five hundred dollars. My God, five hundred dollars! I was one of the Morgans. I could retire for life.

  War in Europe, a speech by Hitler, trouble in Poland, these were the topics of the day. What piffle! You warmongers, you old folks in the lobby of the Alta Loma Hotel, here is the news, here: this little paper with all the fancy legal writing, my book! To hell with that Hitler, this is more important than Hitler, this is about my book. It won’t shake the world, it won’t kill a soul, it won’t fire a gun, ah, but you’ll remember it to the day you die, you’ll lie there breathing your last, and you’ll smile as you remember the book. The story of Vera Rivken, a slice out of life.

  They weren’t interested. They preferred the war in Europe, the funny pictures, and Louella Parsons, the tragic people, the poor people. I just sat in that hotel lobby and shook my head sadly.

  Someone had to know, and that was Camilla. For three weeks I had not seen her, not since the marijuana on Temple Street. But she was not at the saloon. Another girl had her place. I asked for Camilla. The other girl wouldn’t talk. Suddenly the Columbia Buffet was like a tomb. I asked the fat bartender. Camilla had not been there for two weeks. Was she fired? He couldn’t say. Was she sick? He didn’t know. He wouldn’t talk either.

  I could afford a taxicab. I could afford twenty cabs, riding them day and night. I took one cab and rode to Camilla’s place on Temple Street. I knocked on her door and got no answer. I tried the door. It opened, darkness inside, and I switched on the light. She lay there in the Murphy bed. Her face was the face of an old rose pressed and dried in a book, yellowish, with only the eyes to prove there was life in it. The room stank. The blinds were down, the door opened with difficulty until I kicked away the rug against the crack. She gasped when she saw me. She was happy to see me. “Arturo,” she said. “Oh, Arturo!”

  I didn’t speak of the book or the contract. Who cares about a novel, another goddamn novel? That sting in my eyes, it was for her, it was my eyes remembering a wild lean girl running in the moonlight on the beach, a beautiful girl who danced with a beertray in her round arms. She lay there now, broken, brown cigaret butts overflowing a saucer beside her. She had quit. She wanted to die. Those were her words. “I don’t care,” she said.

  “You gotta eat,” I said, because her face was only a skull with yellow skin stretched tightly over it. I sat on the bed and held her fingers, conscious of bones, surprised that they were such small bones, she who had been so straight and round and tall. “You’re hungry,” I said. But she didn’t want food. “Eat anyway,” I said.

  I went out and started buying. It was a few doors down the street, a small grocery store. I ordered whole sections of the place. Gimme all of those, and all of these, gimme this and gimme that. Milk, bread, canned juices, fruit, butter, vegetables, meat, potatoes. It took three trips to carry it all up to her place. When it was all piled there in the kitchen I looked at the stuff and scratched my head, wondering what to feed her.

  “I don’t want anything,” she said.

  Milk. I washed a glass and poured it full. She sat up, her pink nightgown torn at the shoulder, ripping all the more as she moved to sit up. She held her nose and drank it, three swallows, and she gasped and lay back, horrified, nauseated.

  “Fruit juice,” I said. “Grape juice. It’s sweeter, tastes better.” I opened a bottle, poured a glassful, and held it out to her. She gulped it down, lay back and panted. Then she put her head over the side of the bed and vomited. I cleaned it up. I cleaned the apartment. I washed the dishes and scrubbed the sink. I washed her face. I hurried downstairs, grabbed a cab, and rode all over town looking for a place to buy her a clean nightgown. I bought some candy too, and a stack of picture magazines, Look, Pic, See, Sic, Sac, Whack, and all of them—something to distract her, to put her at ease.

  When I got back the door was locked. I knew what that meant. I hammered it with my fists and kicked it with my heels. The din filled the whole building. The doors of other apartments opened in the hall, and heads came out. From downstairs a woman came in an old bathrobe. She was the landlady; I could spot a landlady instantly. She stood at the head of the stairs, afraid to come closer.

  “What do you want?” she said.

  “It’s locked,” I said. “I have to get inside.”

  “You leave that girl alone,” she said. “I know your kind. You leave that poor girl alone or I’ll call the police.”

  “I’m her friend,” I said.

  From inside came the elated, hysterical laughter of Camilla, the giddy shriek of denial. “He’s not my friend! I don’t want him around!” Then her laughter once more, high and frightened and birdlike, trapped in the room. Now the hall was full of people in a state of semi-undress. The atmosphere was nasty, ominous. Two men in shirt sleeves appeared at the other end of the hall. The big one with a cigar hitched up his pants and said, “Let’s throw the guy out of here.” I started moving then, retreating from them walking fast, past the despicable sneer of the landlady and down the stairs to the lower hall. Once in the street I started running. On the corner of Broadway and Temple I saw a cab parked. I got in and told the driver to just keep moving.

  No, it was none of my business. But I could remember, the black cluster of her hair, the wild depth of her eyes, the jolt in the pit of my stomach in the first days I knew her. I stayed away from the place for two days, and then I couldn’t bear it: I wanted to help her. I wanted to get her away from that curtained trap, send her somewhere to the south, down by the sea. I could do it. I had a pile of money. I thought of Sammy, but he loathed her too deeply. If she could only get out of town, that would help a lot. I decided to try once more.

  It was about noon. It was very hot, too hot in the hotel room. It was the heat that made me do it, the sticky ennui, the dust over the earth, the hot blasts from the Mojave. I went to the rear of the Temple Street apartment. There was a wooden stairway leading to the second floor. On such a day as this, her door would be open, to cool the place by cross ventilation from the window.

  I was right. The door was open, but she was not there. Her stuff was piled in the middle of the room, boxes and suitcases with garments squirming from them. The bed was down, the naked mattress showing the sheets gone. The place was stripped of life. Then I caught the odor of disinfectant. The room had been fumigated. I took the stairs three at a time to the landlady’s door.

  “You!” she said, opening the door. “You!” and she slammed it shut. I stood outside and pleaded with her. “I’m her friend,” I said. “I swear to God. I want to help her. You got to believe me.”

  “Go away or I’ll call the police.”

  “She was sick,” I said. “She needed help. I want to do something for her. You’ve got to believe me.”

  The door opened. The woman stood looking straight into my eyes. She was of medium height, stout, her face hardened and without emotion. She said: “Come in.”

  I stepped into a drab room, ornate and weird, cluttered with fantastic gadgets, a piano littered with heavy photographs, wild-colored shawls, fancy lamps and vases. She asked me to sit down, but I didn’t.

  “That girl’s gone,” she said. “She’s gone cr
azy. I had to do it.”

  “Where is she? What happened?”

  “I had to do it. She was a nice girl too.”

  She had been forced to call the police—that was her story. That had happened the night after I was there. Camilla had gone wild, throwing dishes, dumping furniture out of the window, screaming and kicking the walls, slashing the curtains with a knife. The landlady had called the police. The police had come, broken down the door, and seized her. But the police had refused to take her away. They had held her, quieted her, until an ambulance arrived. Wailing and struggling, she had been led away. That was all, except that Camilla owed three weeks’ rent and had done irreparable damage to the furniture and apartment. The landlady mentioned a figure, and I paid her the money. She handed me a receipt and smiled her greasy hypocrisy. “I knew you were a good boy,” she said. “I knew it from the moment I first laid eyes on you. But you just can’t trust strangers in this town.”

  I took the street car to the County Hospital. The nurse in the reception room checked a card file when I mentioned the name of Camilla Lopez. “She’s here,” the nurse said. “But she can’t have visitors.”

  “How is she?”

  “I can’t answer that.”

  “When can I see her?”

  Visiting day was Wednesday. I had to wait four more days. I walked out of the huge hospital and around the grounds. I looked up at the windows and wandered through the grounds. Then I took the street car back to Hill Street and Bunker Hill. Four days to wait. I exhausted them playing pin games and slot machines. Luck was against me. I lost a lot of money, but I killed a lot of time. Tuesday afternoon I walked downtown and started buying things for Camilla. I bought a portable radio, a box of candy, a dressing gown, and a lot of face creams and such things. Then I went to a flower shop and ordered two dozen camellias. I was loaded down when I got to the hospital Wednesday afternoon. The camellias had wilted overnight because I didn’t think about putting them in water. Sweat poured from my face as I climbed the hospital steps. I knew my freckles were in bloom, I could almost feel them popping out of my face.