The Big Hunger

by John Fante

  “I think he’s awfully sweet.”

  “That’s because he owns two Packards, a Pontiac, and a house in Bel Air.”

  She only smiled, for she was not even listening to my appraisal of the whole situation.

  To tell the truth, I am no materialist. But I should like to tell Jenny a few things. I should like to tell her that in my time I have been an automobile owner. It was a wonderful car, all-steel body, with high compression oil pump, shatter-proof glass, side-wings, spotlight, and huge blowout-proof tires.

  Do not misunderstand me. I tell of the Plymouth because I would have you know I have lived, more or less, the life of that blockhead Mike Schwartz. It didn’t last long, for the finance company soon put an end to it. But I didn’t mind, for I had already tired of it, and there were a flock of new stories I wanted to write. Yet I wish I had that car now. For one reason. Jenny is continually relating to me long accounts of the wealth of Mike Schwartz. I am not really interested. I am simply philosophic, a little amused, and a little sad.

  And yet, in spite of it all, I wish I had my Plymouth. For only an hour I wish I had it to call my own. I know how it is done. I would take Jenny for a ride in it some evening. As supercilious as possible I would sit beside her, my hands on the wheel, and saying nothing, not a word. I would let the Plymouth do all the talking. We would drive to Santa Monica and park the car on a hill where the sea meets the stars. With an indifferent flip of my fingers I would throw the switch on the dashboard, and out of the belly of the machine the radio would respond, emitting the frog-croakings of Bing Crosby. I would remain strong and silent, and doing nothing. No need to tell Jenny her hair dizzied me, that the look in her grey eyes was enough to make me forget, for a little while, prose and plots and such wearisome stuff. The whole thing would be machine-made; but for a little while, for only an hour, it would be enough. The Plymouth and Bing Crosby would move Jenny to the depths of her soul, and for a little while it would be all right. Soon enough I would grow tired of it, in an hour perhaps, and we would drive back to the city. Later Jenny would tell others she knew a writer with a Plymouth. Not a mere writer, but a writer with a Plymouth. It wouldn’t matter though.

  Prologue to Ask the Dust

  ASK THE DUST ON THE ROAD! Ask the Joshua trees standing alone where the Mojave begins. Ask them about Camilla Lopez, and they will whisper her name. Yes, for the last one who ever saw my girl Camilla Lopez was a tubercular living on the edge of the Mojave, and she was heading East with a dog I gave her, and the dog was named Pancho, and nobody has ever seen Pancho again either. You will not believe that. You will not believe that a girl would start across the Mojave desert in October with no companion save a young police dog named Pancho, but it happened. I saw the dog prints in the sand, and I saw Camilla’s footprints alongside the dog’s, and she has never come back to Los Angeles, her mother has never seen her again, and unless a miracle happened she is dead out there on the Mojave tonight, and so is Pancho. I do not have to weave a plot for this, my second book. It happened to me. The girl is gone, I was in love with her and she hated me, and that is my story.

  Ask the dust on the road. Ask old Junipero Serra down on the Plaza, his statue is there, and so are the streaks across it where I lit matches, smoked cigarettes, and watched humanity pass by, I, John Fante and Arturo Bandini, two in one, friend of man and beast alike. Those were the days! I wandered these streets and sucked them up and the people in them like a man made of blotter fiber. Arturo Bandini, with one short story sold, great writer dreaming big plans. I can still see that guy, that Bandini guy, with a green-covered magazine under his arm, perpetually under his arm, walking this town with gentle tolerance for man and beast alike, a philosopher he was, a young one, the plain tale of a writer who fell in love with a bar girl and was told to go.

  But look, let me try to tell my story. I fell in love with a girl named Camilla Lopez. I went into a café one night, and there she was, and ever after, even to now, tonight, when I write about it I choke when I think of the beauty of that girl. She was there, beside me, she was a waitress in a beer hall, she brought me coffee and I thought it was bum coffee and we talked. Then I came back again and again, and soon I was so crazy in love I behaved like a fool, and all the time she loved somebody else, she loved a bartender in the Liberty Buffet where she worked, and the bartender couldn’t stand her. So she went out with me, to forget him, she went everywhere with me, and I was insane about her, and I got worse, and she got worse about the bartender. She began to smoke marijuana. She taught me to smoke it. She cracked up. She was put into an insane asylum. She was there a month. She came out and I saw her again. She was still in love with Sammy the bartender. He couldn’t bear her. He couldn’t bear her because she was simply a Mexican to him and he was an American and she was beneath him, and that is the story—that is the Ramona theme, only this time it is an Italian-American telling it, and he, Bandini, is sympathetic with the girl because he understands how it is with this business of social prejudice, and he loves her madly and she can’t understand him. He is a writer. He is alone in Los Angeles. He writes sonnets to this girl. She reads the sonnets and tosses them in the street. Ask the dust on the street, ask the sawdust in the Liberty Buffet, ask the goddamn dirty sawdust in that place and it will say that it received little pieces of paper and they were my sonnets, because she didn’t care for me, I only amused her, she was mad about the American Sammy.

  You don’t think I have a novel? Listen goddamnit, I met Camilla and the first night we went to the beach and swam naked, and she swam far out, far beyond the breakwater in Santa Monica Bay, we drove out there in her car, and she swam away, out there in the moonlight, beautiful girl, beautiful Camilla, oh hell how I loved that girl, and oh hell what a dirty hand she dealt me, she thought I was a lunatic, that I said funny things, she swam out, far too much swimming for a normal girl, and in that cold ocean at two in the morning, and when I saw her in the moonlight I had a hunch, that very first night I had a hunch that she was the sort of girl who cracks under social pressure, there was something sensitive and beautiful about her even then and always, gorgeous girl, black hair, cream skin, swimming in the moonlight, daring me to come out as far as she had swum, and I didn’t, I swam out a distance and got tired and then she came in and we rolled up in a blanket on the beach and went to sleep—a couple of naked kids, but I felt it lying beside her then—that feeling that I would never possess this girl, felt that somehow she was poison and that it would never happen, felt passion without desire, felt the strangeness of her, felt it within me with the sureness of my mother’s breast, this thing devouring a beautiful Mexican girl who belonged in that land, under that sky, and was not welcome. And I, the sympathetic one, the lover of man and beast alike, ask the sand along the Santa Monica Bay if the great Arturo Bandini was so great a lover that night, no no no, because I was sorry for her like a man sorry for his little girl and it wasn’t passion I felt but only desire, and that’s all it ever was. And then at five in the morning, with the sun coming up in the East, we drove down Wilshire and she was so pleased that I had not touched her, she was driving the car, and she said a strange and significant thing, I remember the words exactly, she said, “This was such a beautiful night. It won’t ever happen again.” But always there was with me the suspicion that I had acted like a fool, not that night alone but every night I was with her, as we visited many strange and fascinating places in this great city. Do I speak of Hollywood with its tinsel blah? of the movies? do I speak of Bel Air and Lakeside? do I speak of Pasadena and the hot spots hereabouts?—no and no a thousand times. I tell you this is a book about a girl and a boy in a different civilization: this is about Main Street and Spring Street and Bunker Hill, about this town no farther west than Figueroa, and nobody famous is in this book and nothing notorious or famous will be mentioned because none of that belongs here in this book, or will be here much longer. This is Ramona in reverse. It’s good. It’s myself.

  So I call my book Ask the Dus
t because the dust of the East and Middle West is in these streets, and it is a dust where nothing will grow, a culture without roots, a frantic grasping for entrenchment, the empty fury of lost hopeless people frenzied to reach an earth that cannot ever belong to them. And a misguided girl who thought the frenzied ones were the happy ones, and who tried to be one of them.

  Arturo Bandini, myself, great writer, with one story sold to The American Mercury, the story ever in my pocket just to prove my success as I hung around the Opera House and watched the richies going in, sometimes slipping out of the crowd to accidentally touch an ermine wrap, just a fellow passing by, excuse me, lady, and through long hours of the night I’d think of her, wondering who she was—perhaps even the heroine of my great novel, talking to her while the lights of the St. Paul Hotel blinked red and green and threw colors across my bed.

  Those were the days. Ask the dust on the road, ask the cobwebs in my room in the St. Paul, go to the mice coming out of the corner of the room, ah such friendly mice, I had them for pets, why I used to talk to those mice. “Hello mouse, how are you tonight, where’s your pals?” Sure, a friend of man and beast alike, feeding the mice to make them my friends, a great man, a kindly soul, reader of Thoreau and Emerson, big coming writer who had to be tolerant, spreading crumbs for my mice to eat in the night with the lights of the St. Paul going on and off and I lay watching them scamper to and fro, until it had to end, they got too affectionate, they climbed up on my bed and sat at the foot, we were great friends, but hell they multiplied like Chinese and the room was too small.

  Do I speak like a lunatic? Then give me lunacy, give me those days again. Give me a whimsical novel of one who pitied mankind, great person Bandini, maker of magnificent exits, the pity of it all, the absurd city around me, fortunate foster parent of my genius, and up Angel’s Flight, up two hundred stairs to Bunker Hill in the middle of town, consecrated steps, Sir, Bandini trod upon them to immortality! Some day, ye people, ye yea-sayers, these steps shall ring with my memory, and over yonder on that high wall shall be a plaque of gold, and upon it a bas-relief—the image of my face. Am I alone now? Poof! My loneliness bears fruit, and there shall be a Los Angeles of tomorrow to remember that a Voice trod these stairs, and Benny the Gouge down on the corner of Third and Hill will weep for joy as he telleth his grandchild that he once spoke with a man of the ages. And so to my room, to have a conversation with myself in the mirror. Or maybe to practice a bit for the days of my fame, to set the mirror at an angle, to see how I look sitting at my typewriter, the great one at work, answering questions for the press, blinking patiently while the flashbulbs explode. “Gentlemen, gentlemen! If you please! My eyes, gentlemen—after all, I too have my work, you know.” Laughter from the gentlemen of the press. “Jesus, that guy Bandini, a swell fella, fame didn’t get to him. Just like any of us, common newspaper guys—a real swell fella.”

  Ask the dusty halls, ask the dusty lobby, ask the dusty people in the dusty lobby of the St. Paul, the tired dusty people themselves old and soon to be dust, here to die, the old folks, the dust of Indiana and Ohio and Illinois and Iowa in their blood, to dust and die in a rootless dusty land. Six years ago and so many are already dust, but some there are who remember the great writer, no dust in his mouth, nay, nay, no dust in his mouth, big liar writer talking about big stories in The Saturday Evening Post and proving it with a story in a green magazine. Great writer, frequenter of dusty bookshops, lifting dusty magazines and blowing the dust from his beloved story, buying them up, his story, that it should not become dust. Yea, ask the dust on the road.

  Ho hie ho, big writer writing letters home to Mamma, big writer finding it tough, but look Mamma, I got a story coming out in The Atlantic, in the Pacific, so send five dollars, Mamma, send me five dollars. And so with five dollars, with ten dollars, big writer with green magazine in clip joint talking to dusty blonde telling big blonde of a greater day. Had she read “Carissima Mia,” by Arturo Bandini? No, then too bad. Had she read “Mea Culpa,” by Arturo Bandini? Yes, she had. Strange. Because it was never written. But five dollars and ten dollars, out of the dust of Colorado, to help Mamma’s boy—mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

  A book teeming with people, dusty savage people. The real Los Angeles, Bunker Hill, that part of town below Figueroa, and Arturo Bandini dreaming of great days. The people who crossed his path: Marcus, the wineseller, who gave me a job as busboy because he thought I wrote serials for the SatEvePost. Mrs. Adolph Lang with her pink fat breasts which she offered me, I lived next door to her at the St. Paul, her pink fat breasts she offered me because she was the mother of God and I should partake of the milk of life. Dave Myers the Communist on the corner of Third and Hill with his crippled leg out of which he sold marijuana cigarettes. The old ladies who were God’s Chosen People and had to make sacrifices with the Blood of the Lamb, but they had no lamb, so they killed a beautiful Siamese cat. The fat Negro who took Camilla and me down a long black sinister alley to Central Avenue and up some rickety stairs to a room in a deserted hotel where men and women lay about like dead people, and the fat Negro throwing them off the bed, splitting the mattress open and selling us marijuana out of the slit. Later in my own room we smoke the marijuana. One cigarette, no effect. Two. The room dims. Arturo’s body lifts. He is off the floor, one inch, two. Up and up and oh absurd world, absurd Camilla, and Arturo laughed and laughed, but not Camilla, her mouth softening, white saliva like threads of silk clinging to her wanton mouth, opening tenderly to say his name, Arturo, Arturo. Yea and amen. Big stuff. Jesus what a novel! The two lesbian women playing the piano at the Embassy, playing Strauss waltzes for Camilla while Arturo turns black and spits beer over the piano and into the violinist’s hair. The drunken painters in the studio above, the sad painters, the hopeless painters, school of S. McDonald Wright, last vestige of a painting movement to unite the east and west. The hundreds of crummy lower Fifth Street nightclubs crammed with beautiful women, girls writing home to Iowa and Indiana that they were clicking, clicking in the big town, fooey, they were not clicking, they were fucking anybody and anything, Filipino and Jap and Negro in a place glutted with a plethora of beauty. Ah, those nightclubs, where I learned to wander and idle, sometimes with money from another short story sold, sometimes broke, often borrowing money from the girls.

  The poor box at the old Plaza church, from which I stole sixty cents because I was poor wasn’t I? The Filipino dance hall the cops raided for drugs, the cops rushing in, the lights going out, the cops screaming and fighting madly in the blackness, and the calm little Filipinos off in dark corners, flipping safety razor blades off their index fingers with the speed of machine gun bullets, cutting the faces of the cops to ribbons.

  The quaint and the strange and the beautiful: one night a woman too beautiful for this world came along and on wings of perfume, I could not bear it, could not resist following her, who she was I never knew, woman in a red fox and pert little hat, trailing after her because she was better than a dream, watching her enter Bernstein’s Fish Grotto, watching her in a trance through a window swimming with frogs and trout as she ate, and when she was through the boy enters the Grotto, seats himself at the very seat she used, fingers the very napkin she used, because she was so beautiful and—just a cup of soup, waiter, not hungry, just a cup of soup for fifteen cents. Love on a budget, a heroine free and for nothing, to be remembered through a window swimming with trout and frogs.

  Hamsun’s Hunger, but this is a hunger for living in a land of dust, hunger for seeing and doing. Yes, Hamsun’s Hunger. Clarence Melville the drunken Spanish-American War veteran, he lived across the hall. He had a light housekeeping room. He was tired of oranges, too. He had a car. We got in it one night. He knew where to get meat. We drove to San Fernando. We parked the car. We crawled through barbed wire fences into the pasture. We tiptoed to the barn. There was the calf. Clarence hit it over the head with a sledgehammer. We dragged the bloody thing to the car and drove back to Los Angeles. We dragged i
t through the back way to his room. God what a night that was! The calf wouldn’t die, no matter how hard we hit it. Then the blood on the floor, the carpet, the walls, the bathtub. I was sick. I couldn’t eat any of it. Blood in the hall, and the police came. They found Clarence in the bathroom, butchering the calf. He got sixty days, and all the time he was on trial and in jail I stayed in my room, spent a great part of it praying, not to Hamsun or to Heine, but to Our Blessed Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Save me Lord, I am innocent.

  Ask Camilla Lopez. Ask her. Tell him, Camilla. Tell this hardheaded publisher about us. “Well, you see: my name is Camilla and Arturo loved me, and I thought he was so silly, he wrote me sonnets and they didn’t make sense. I passed them around to the drunken lawyers in the Liberty Buffet, and they laughed, so you see he was silly because even lawyers laughed. Once I told him, I said, Arturo, I want to be smart like you. So he bought me a speller, this was right after we met, and he bought me a speller, and he said to learn five words a day, and I did—the first day—but he wasn’t like Sammy, the bartender. Oh that Sammy! Such eyes in the head of Sammy, and Sammy was a man, not a silly writer guy, not a sissy, and I loved that Sammy, and he hated me, oh God he hated me. Because I was a Mexican, he called me Spick, he called me Greaser, he hurt me so. But him! This Arturo, he told me to be proud I was a Mexican, he even said the meek shall inherit the earth, Jesus, I didn’t want the earth, I only wanted Sammy, and I threw the speller in his face, because I like a man to be like a man, I don’t like a man who is only words, words, words, that’s all he was, this Arturo, ask the bed in which we slept, five times I gave him his chance, five times and he talked to me like a doll, but he never touched me and I tossed my hair and laughed and told him, Arturo, you’re not a man, there’s something wrong with you, because you’re not a man. But I didn’t want him anyway, I didn’t care, I wanted to forget Sammy, and there was Arturo in the bed and he was crying, saying he didn’t know why but he couldn’t do it, he loved me so, he loved me so. I used to go to his room in the St. Paul Hotel, toss pebbles at his window, and he’d pull me in, and I’d stay, because I knew he wouldn’t touch me, and then I hated him because he kept saying I should be proud I was a Mexican, and then I dared him to touch me, I lifted my dress and threw it over his face and he who knew so much and was so clever with all his words, he blushed and said please don’t do things like that, Camilla. And when we went down on Main Street to the shooting gallery and shot clay pigeons, how many did I knock down? All of them! Every one of them. And him? He missed them all! Not one did he hit—but Sammy was not like that, Sammy knocked them all down, too. We used to go riding at night, Arturo and me. Riding out to Terminal Island, to San Pedro, and I liked crazy things, like straddling an oiltank truck, but would Arturo do it? No he wouldn’t, no he said it was absurd, that’s what he called it, but the truck driver didn’t think so, no the truck driver laughed, and I left Arturo out there and came back with the truck driver. And then he’d come into the Liberty after that, whining to see me and giving me a poem but he made me so mad because he wasn’t like Sammy, even if Sammy beat me, even if Sammy called me a Spick. But sometimes he was cute, sometimes he gave me flowers, he bought me one flower at a time, he called it a camellia, like my name, so I guess I learned something after all out of him, because I didn’t know those white and pink flowers were named like my name. But I didn’t care much for them, they didn’t smell half as good as gardenias.”