by John Fante
“Pretty good.”
“That’s just raw power. You should see what happens to a baseball.”
“Remember. Send money home.”
I knew I could count on Kenny. He had a regular weekly allowance and a bank account, and besides, it wasn’t quite like being flat broke and asking him to finance the whole trip.
From the street I saw the light in his window, so I knew he was home. Light bloomed in Dorothy’s window too, and I hoped it would be she who opened the door when I rang the bell, and not Kenny.
It wasn’t Kenny either. It was Mr. Parrish.
“I want to talk to you,” he said, quickly stepping out on the porch and closing the door. He was like a piece of ice. He tried to keep his voice frozen too, but it trembled with emotion.
“I want you to stay away from my son,” he said. “And stay away from this house.” His finger jabbed my chest. “Is that clear? You’re not welcome here.” He was shaking.
“What’s wrong with you?” I said.
“Now, listen. Kenny’s not going on this stupid junket. Those are my orders. And he’s not to associate with you anymore. You’re a bad influence on the boy, understand? So leave him alone. Stay away from here, clear away on your side of town, or I’ll call the police.”
Before I could speak, and I had nothing to say, he rushed inside, bolted the door loudly, and turned off the porch light. I walked away in a daze. I knew Mr. Parrish didn’t like me very well, but not that he hated me. Was it because I had driven his truck? Had Ken told him about the mixer? Did he know what happened between Dorothy and me? I didn’t know.
I didn’t know anything, the time of day, my ass from a hot rock, who I was, or why, and all at once, trudging down the hill toward home, I didn’t care, I was tired of caring, and in his way Mr. Parrish had made the decision for me. The trip was off. No Kenny, no trip. I was too stupid to make it alone, I might go the wrong way, end up in Torricella Peligna, where I belonged. My father was right. I should wait a year. Hell, Roper wasn’t such a bad town. At least I could walk around in it without getting lost. I would return the money to my father and wait another year.
The Arm began to protest, twitching, crying like a spoiled child, calling me chicken, a welcher. You crumb, you creep, all you think about is yourself. I gave it a consoling pat. Look, I said, there’s plenty of time, let’s finish our education and have a nice summer right here in Roper. We’ll work for the old man, pitch on Sundays, and save our money. But The Arm didn’t care for that kind of talk. It got flabby and listless and pretended it was dead. I had to smile. What a sly one!
Turning up our street past Art’s Service Station, I saw something familiar in the open garage that served as a grease rack. I crossed the asphalt for a closer look. And there it was, my father’s concrete mixer, the engine dismantled, the parts spread on the floor, the carburetor soaking in a bucket of gasoline.
I had a sudden pain in my chest, a feeling that I was going to cry. Over my shoulder I saw Art Belden, the station owner, leaning back in a chair, listening to Bing Crosby singing, “Where the Blue of the Night” over the radio. I walked over and opened the door, and Art said, “Hi, Dom.”
His open lunch pail was on the desk in front of him. He was dressed in white coveralls with four pencils in the chest pocket, and I hated him. I hated the precision neatness of the peanut butter sandwiches he was eating, the crusts daintily cut away by his wife. I hated her too. I hated the snug grey bungalow they lived in on Spruce Street. I hated his Collie dog. I hated his amiable smile, and I hated his answer before I even asked what my father’s mixer was doing in his garage.
“It used to be your father’s,” he said. “I bought it this afternoon.”
I believed him, and I said, “I don’t believe you.”
He bit into his sandwich, turned off Bing Crosby, and handed me the bill of sale, signed by my father. For the twenty-five greasy dollars in my pocket.
“I’ll buy it back.”
“It’s not for sale.”
“I’ll give you thirty.”
He shook his head and poured milk into a cup from his thermos.
“Make it forty.”
“Look. I don’t want to sell it.”
I pulled out the wad of bills and tossed it on the desk. “Fifty bucks. Twenty-five now, and twenty-five this summer.”
A car drove up and he went out to service it. I picked up the roll of money and walked back to the mixer. It was beat up and banged like my father’s hands, a part of his life, so strangely ancient, as if from a far country, from Torricella Peligna. I put my arms around it and kissed it with my mouth and cried for my father and all fathers, and sons too, for being alive in that time, for myself, because I had to go to California now, I had no choice, I had to make good.
About the Author
JOHN FANTE was born in Colorado in 1909. He attended parochial school in Boulder, and Regis High School, a Jesuit boarding school. He also attended the University of Colorado and Long Beach City College.
Fante began writing in 1929 and published his first short story in The American Mercury in 1932. He published numerous stories in The Atlantic Monthly, The American Mercury, The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Esquire, and Harper’s Bazaar. His first novel, Wait Until Spring, Bandini was published in 1938. The following year Ask the Dust appeared, and in 1940 a collection of his short stories, Dago Red, was published and is now collected in The Wine of Youth.
Meanwhile, Fante had been occupied extensively in screenwriting. Some of his credits include Full of Life, Jeanne Eagels, My Man and I, The Reluctant Saint, Something for a Lonely Man, My Six Loves and Walk on the Wild Side.
John Fante was stricken with diabetes in 1955 and its complications brought about his blindness in 1978, but he continued to write by dictation to his wife, Joyce, and the result was Dreams from Bunker Hill (1982). He died at the age of 74 on May 8, 1983.
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Other Books by John Fante
The Saga of Arturo Bandini:
Wait Until Spring, Bandini
The Road to Los Angeles
Ask the Dust
Dreams from Bunker Hill
Full of Life
The Brotherhood of the Grape
The Wine of Youth: Selected Stories of John Fante
1933 Was a Bad Year
West of Rome
Selected Letters 1932-1981
The Big Hunger: Stories 1932-1959
The John Fante Reader
Copyright
Previously published by Black Sparrow Press
1933 WAS A BAD YEAR. Copyright © 1985 by Joyce Fante.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © APRIL 2010 ISBN: 978-0-062-01299-9
First Ecco edition 2002
The Library of Congress has catalogued a previous edition as follows:
Fante, John, 1909-1983
1933 was a bad year.
Summary: Trapped in a small, poverty-ridden town in 1933, under pressure from his father to go into the family business, seventeen-year-old Dominic Molise yearns to fulfill his own dreams.
[1. Depressions – 1929 – Fiction. 2. Fathers and sons – Fiction. 3. City and town life – Fiction. 4. Italian Americans – Fiction] I. Title.
PZ3.F2223Aaf 1985 [Fic] 85-T5626
ISBN 0-87685-656-3
ISBN 0-87685-655-5 (pbk.)
ISBN 0-87685-657-1 (deluxe)
10 11 12
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