The Big Hunger

by John Fante

  After a half hour of this, I asked her to stroll along the beach with me, but she positively refused with a succinct “Never!”

  I got mad and almost forgot I was a professor.

  Next, I pleaded with her.

  “No. I won’t leave this hall.”

  “Why not?”

  Arguing with her would do no good. She had so excited me that my temples throbbed. I leaned back and closed my eyes and tried to think of better inducements.

  She too relaxed, tossing her head over the back of the seat.

  I looked down at her thighs. A red garter peeped from under the hem of her dress.

  Unnoticed, I reached over, seized the elastic with my fingers, tugged on it, and let go.

  The garter snapped into place, stinging her. Astonished, she seized my hand exclaiming, “Why, professor!”

  “Ten million apologies.”

  “You should be ashamed,” she said.

  “You shouldn’t have displayed your thighs. I was only cautioning you.”

  She still held my hand, and presently her palm was within mine. Her fingertips moved gently over the calluses, and her hand became tight, as though recoiling from something disgusting. That morning before work I had split the broken blisters open and applied iodine to keep the inner skin from blistering. I could not work with gloves. The splitting left the mounds sharp and jagged, like an animal’s paw, so that rubbing my hand across my forearm left white scratch marks.

  The girl opened the hand and held it on her knee.

  “Heavens,” she said. “What horrid hands. What on earth did you do to them?”

  The iodine stains looked like dried blood. I could not think of an evasion.

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” I said.

  “Sure it’s something.”

  She jumped to her feet and slapped her hands to her sides.

  “Say, you’ve been lying to me.”

  She was very angry. The cords in her neck bulged.

  “Lying?” I had not risen.

  “You’re no professor. You’re nothing but a ditch digger, or a truck driver, or something.”

  “Well, what of it?”

  “What of it? Look at your hands. Look at your dirty old lumber jacket. You’re no professor. You’re a liar. That’s what you are. A dirty liar.”

  She was almost yelling. Her eyes began to tear. I remained tongue-tied, but if we had been alone, I surely would have mauled her. I stared foolishly at my broken palms and tried to smile. Many people were watching us. I saw an old woman wearing glasses, who smiled. What are you giggling about, I thought, you archaic bag of bones. Then I tried to fashion words to shape my predicament into literature, but all I thought of was profanity, and my fist against the girl’s mouth. I thought of an idea for a story, wherein the man kills the woman, and I wondered if my notebook was about so that I could take note of the idea. I thought that if I ever wanted to remember the incident with complacency I should stand up and slap the girl’s face, at least. Instead I said, “I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry.”

  “Oh, you are, are you? You dirty liar.”

  God, I thought, is that the only denunciation she knows?

  Her right hand left her hip, and the back of it thumped across my face. The blow tickled and smarted.

  I jumped to my feet. I wanted to knock her down. Instead, I scribbled mentally, “Her hand shot out, and he felt a sharp pain under his eyes, and he leaped to his feet.”

  Mumbling curses, I sat down again, casting hostile leers at the gaping audience. The girl had disappeared in the crowd.

  Suddenly I thought of Nietzsche and Cabell and Nathan and Lewis and Anderson and many more. God damn Nietzsche. God damn the great Mencken. God damn Cabell. God damn the whole God damn outfit. I should have torn the virago to shreds. What’s wrong with my hands. God damn my father. God damn my mother. God damn myself. Why didn’t I hit her? Why didn’t I knock her for a roll? Be hard—Oh Nietzsche, get away, will you? For Christ’s sake, leave me alone for a minute. Concepts of good and evil are merely means to an end. All is good which proceeds from strength, power, health, happiness and awfulness. What does he mean by awfulness? Not horror. No, he means full of awe. I should have killed her. Jurgen is indeed a monstrous clever fellow. At least she thought I was a professor. I should have called her a poltroon, or an ignoramus, at least. Everett Dean Martin’s definition of an educated man is just fine. Sex equality should continue—but what the hell could I do. Nietzsche says that at bottom the sexes are antagonistic. I’d like to have my hands on her for about two minutes. I should be home. I must write seven hundred words and read fifty pages.

  I went to the fountain at the entrance of the hall and ordered a cup of coffee, then a second. The waitress stood near me as I put the usual three spoons of sugar into my cup.

  “The next time,” she said, “I’ll pour your coffee in the sugar bowl. It’ll save energy.”

  “Your knowledge of physics is abominable,” I said. “Don’t you know that no energy can be lost?”

  “Smart egg, aren’t you?”

  “I’m a monstrous clever fellow.”

  Kiss a man, and kiss a man, and then, because his hands are calloused, be insulted. Because he works hard, think he’s a scoundrel. There’s one for The American Credo. She’s a poltroon, a Christian. She belongs in a nunnery. Sister Ethelbert is in a convent in Wyoming praying for me. Paul Reinert and Dan Campbell are in a novitiate in St. Louis. Jesuitism. Damn all religion. I must strengthen my irreligion. They should legislate against religion. William J. Bryan was a scoundrel. And what awful books he wrote. I must go home and write. I should have killed her. What did Jurgen say? Didn’t he have a parallel case? I’ll never be able to write like Cabell. Wistful, shy, sweet writer. My mother’s up, waiting for me. What the hell, can’t I take care of myself? Some day, I’ll blow up this myth around women. Maybe, as a gentleman, I might have gotten her to walk with me. Maybe, as a gentleman, I could have had her down on the cool sand. Hah! There I go, arguing like Jurgen. Marvelous. I must go home and write.

  I turned and saw Eddie. His brow was dewy. The sparkle of his eye was of one who was having a great evening.

  “For Christ sake!” Eddie said. “Where have you been? I been looking all over for you.”

  “Oh, here and there.”

  “I been every place.”

  “Ready to go home?”

  “Home? God no. I got something. Something swell!”

  “No more vixens for me.”

  “What’re vixens?”

  “Women.”

  “Oh. But can the book talk, will you?”

  “I came very close to a successful evening,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  I told him about my professorial interlude.

  “You’re a sap. I woulda ruined a dame like that.”

  He was impatient “Come on! Let’s get going.”

  I paid for my coffee.

  “Where?”

  “Places, boy. Places.”

  “No, I have to go home. Hard day tomorrow.”

  “All you ever want to do is stick your nose in books. It don’t do no good.”

  “Sez you.”

  “They’re swell girls.” He smiled, outlining the form of a woman with his hands.

  I winked a question.

  “A cinch,” he drawled, snapping his fingers. “They’re down in the car now. I thought you’d be waitin’ there. I been looking all over for you.”

  “Let’s go.”

  I decided to write only three hundred words. My reading could be dismissed for the night.

  We stepped out of the dance hall.

  “They’re a blonde and a brunette,” Eddie said. “You take the brunette.”

  “Is she easy to look at?”

  “Wait!”

  Eddie’s car was a block away. It was a yellow-wheeled Ford roadster. The girls’ heads were visible through the small back window.

  Eddie placed one foot on the running board.
>
  “Well, Elsie,” he said, “here’s your boyfriend.”

  The blonde-headed one put her head out and examined me.

  Great was our mutual astonishment, for it was the same girl who earlier in the evening had guessed that I could dance with her. Her companion was Elsie, the same girl who was with her then.

  “Oh,” she said, “so it’s you?”

  “Correct.” I was laughing.

  “Oh,” Elsie said.

  “You know them?” Eddie asked.

  “Intimately. Verily, but I consigned her to flaming perdition, but an hour past.”

  “Aw, can the book talk and talk United States.”

  “May you, too, suffer the eternal pains of hell,” I said.

  The brunette, Elsie, deliberately looked away.

  “What’s he done?” Eddie asked.

  “He insulted me,” the blonde said.

  “Me too,” Elsie said.

  “Jesus,” Eddie said. “You’re a fine egg. You think you know too much. You busted up a swell party.”

  “I won’t ride with him,” Elsie said.

  “Me neither,” the blonde said. Her name was Sarah.

  No one spoke for two minutes. I gazed at my shoes. Sarah leered through the windshield, her chin projected with some exertion. Elsie still looked out the other side. Eddie drew pictures with his finger on the side wing.

  “Aw hell,” he said. “Let’s forget it.”

  “No.”

  “I should say not.”

  “If he apologizes,” Eddie exclaimed, as though he were suggesting something brilliant, “will it be okay?”

  Apologies were really unnecessary. The girls would come around, for they were anxious for a good time,

  They looked at one another and smiled.

  Elsie said, “He has to be real, real sorry.”

  “Apologize,” Eddie said.

  “Elsie,” I said, “I am so prostrate with grief that I wouldst kiss thy feet, if thou but findeth my sorrow sincere.”

  She clapped her hands. “Wasn’t that sweet, Sarah?”

  “Swell.”

  “Boy, that’s the way to do it.”

  “I would have you know that I am a monstrous clever fellow.”

  Eddie spat.

  “And I’ll have you know that you sure love yourself,” he said.

  “You’re forgiven,” Elsie said. “You can ride with me now.”

  “Sure,” Sarah said. “You’re forgiven.”

  Elsie got out of the front seat and climbed into the rumble. In performing this movement, she gave me to understand that her legs were stockingless, and that she wore sky-blue step-ins.

  I started after her.

  “Wait a minute,” the blonde said. “Haven’t you forgotten something?”

  “My perception is a-quiver to the minutest details,” I said, looking at Elsie’s legs.

  “Aw, talk United States,” Eddie said.

  “What did he forget?” Elsie said.

  “He said he’d kiss your feet,” Sarah said, giggling.

  “Like hell, I will.”

  “You said you would,” Elsie said.

  “Go on,” Eddie said, “do it. Let’s get started before sun up.

  “I denounced the idea with gusto, albeit mightily pretentious gusto; and then I kissed her feet.

  I climbed in beside her, the motor sputtered, and we were off.

  The night was lovely. There was a yellow moon.

  Elsie’s breath was putrid, smelling of wine and garlic.

  I reached into my pocket for a package of gum.

  “Chew?”

  “Oh, I never touch gum.”

  Earlier in the evening, when I first saw her, her mouth was full of it.

  “You should. It exercises the gums in these days of Hoover prosperity and soft foods.”

  “Well, I’ll chew one, if you will.”

  After a while I showed her the calluses on my hands. She pressed a kiss in each palm, and I cursed the college girl. But I would have preferred her to Elsie with me, in the rumble seat.

  “My brother has them worse than that,” she said.

  “These calluses are unequivocally the worst in the world. I challenge comparison, even your brother’s.”

  “My! But you are a monstrous clever guy.”

  “You mean, a monstrous clever fellow,” I said.

  Elsie and Sarah never drank, they swore, and we were not surprised at their oaths, so Eddie steered the car to a dark section of the harbor, where we pooled our money and purchased a case of beer. The bootlegger gave us four additional bottles, gratis.

  We decided not to guzzle the beer until after midnight. But when Sarah and Elsie insisted they were not hungry, each of us consumed a bottle and then we went to a restaurant and ate a delicious supper. Never had I seen such gormandizers as Sarah and Elsie.

  When we left the restaurant, it was almost midnight. Elsie and Sarah suggested that we take them home. They didn’t like to stay out late since those San Diego murders, and you never knew who you might meet.

  Eddie and I roared.

  Then Eddie drove to a hotel, where we rented a suite. The night clerk allowed us to transport the beer through the lounge room, so we gave him a dollar tip and two bottles of the stuff.

  At five o’clock the car leaped the curbing before my place, and I got out. The blonde was driving. Eddie slept at her side. Elsie too was asleep, in the rumble seat. For an hour we had driven over the surrounding beach territory fruitlessly searching for the girl who had slapped me at the dance hall, but at that hour we saw no one, least of all a precise girl. Very angry, Elsie had suggested the search after I related the incident, though finally, in tears, she had fallen asleep.

  Riding in the morning air, now whitening with fog, had sobered me. The hour was too late to go to bed, and too early for work, and yet I was not tired. I determined to write until morning. I knew that my mother was waiting for me inside, her rage bubbling to be released.

  I opened the door noiselessly, but my mother, sitting under the lamp, woke up as by instinct. In the same room my brother slept on a davenette; together we shared the bed.

  “Well, here you come, you old bum,” my mother said.

  I closed the door.

  “You’ve been drinking, I can smell the nasty stuff over here.”

  I sat down on the bed.

  “I spent three thousand dollars to give you a good Catholic education. And now look at you. Shame. Shame.”

  I began untying a shoe.

  “Lift up your heart to God and see what you’re doing.”

  My shoe fell with a soft thud.

  “Mortal sin after mortal sin. I suppose you were out with some nasty girl, getting yourself full of disease. O God, forgive him. Forgive my son.”

  My stockings were sweat-soaked. Why did Nietzsche dislike beer so much? The man had an iron will. Asceticism did a man no good, but if concepts of good and evil were purely human products, I suppose it was his privilege.

  “And dear God only knows I’ve slaved to keep this boy of mine right.”

  I wish I knew somebody who could interpret Nietzsche for me in practical terms.

  “Why can’t you be a good boy like Paul Reinert? He’s studying to be a priest, and there’s God in his heart. He never done the things you do. He don’t get drunk or read books against God.”

  But suppose every man accepted Nietzsche’s words, and followed them. Why then, I suppose men like myself would soon run to some extreme, like Emerson. Emerson sure likes to show off his vocabulary. He keeps you dizzy thumbing a dictionary. Let’s see, his definition of the soul is The Pervading Spirit of the Universe. A hell of a lot of information that gives. Pious hocus-pocus.

  “Like father, like son. You’re worse than your father. Oh why did I marry him? Why didn’t God strike me dead at the altar?”

  If I only had time to read all of Emerson, though. Undoubtedly it’s excellent vocabulary training.

  “You’re ju
st a dirty animal without a thought of God or man. Oh, I’m tired of this life.”

  I could buy all of Emerson in the dollar books. If I had saved my money tonight I could have bought seven books. But thank God I’m a poor working stiff, or I’d never touch a book.

  “Almighty God, Blessed Virgin Mary, St. Joseph, take me from this suffering world.”

  My brother turned over and snarled, “For God’s sake, get to bed. I can’t sleep with all this noise.”

  “Unless I’m woefully mistaken, I haven’t spoken a word,” I said.

  “You have plenty of time to give him the dickens tomorrow, Ma,” he said.

  “And here I work and slave and all you do is read books against God. Don’t those nasty books tell about obedience?”

  Alas, I’m suffering the same torments as Jurgen after Koshchei brought forth Jurgen’s wife.

  “Do those nasty books tell you to go to church? Or love your mother? Oh, you dog, you don’t love your mother. You’d rather see her dead.”

  “But I do love you, Ma,” I said.

  “Love? Love? Is this love? Staying out with dirty, impure women. I know you’ve been with them. I can see it. You can’t fool me.”

  “I have to have some pleasure,” I said.

  “Pleasure? Pleasure. You call mortal sin a pleasure? Oh, my boy, my poor boy. Is that what the books tell you? You never saw Paul Reinert out with dirty women, did you?”

  God damn Paul Reinert and all God damn priests in the world.

  “You’re ruined. Your soul is black. Black as coal!”

  I decided not to wear pajamas. I was beginning to tire. I decided not to write. I looked at my hands, and regretted that I had not knocked the girl down. I wished that I could go to school with her opportunity. I could see the girl in black satin, racing down the dance floor. I would read a passage from Zarathustra and ponder it in bed before sleep.

  “Tomorrow I’m going to tear up all your dirty books,” my mother shouted. “I’ll burn every one of ’em.”

  “You do, and by the gods I’ll leave home.”

  “Get to bed!” my brother shouted.

  “Yes, please,” said my sister from the other room.