Dreams From Bunker Hill
Page 12
“She’s gone. She’s dead.”
“How?” I said. “When?”
“A week ago. She died of a stroke.”
I felt myself weakening, as I staggered toward an armchair at the window. I didn’t want to cry. Something deep and abiding had caved in, swallowing me up. I felt my chest heaving. The brother came over and stood beside me, crying.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I got up, hefted my suitcase, and walked out. At the little depot on Angel’s Flight I saw on a park bench and let my grief have its way. For two hours I was there, griefstricken and bewildered. I had thought of many things since knowing her, but never her death. For all her years, she nourished a love in me. Now it was gone. Now that she was dead I could think of her no longer. I had sobbed and whimpered and wept until it was all gone, all of it, and as always I found myself alone in the world.
The manager of the Filipino hotel was glad to see me. It was no surprise when he said that my room was unoccupied. It was my kind of room. I deserved it—the smallest, most uninviting room in Los Angeles. I started up the stairs and pushed opend the door to the dreadful hole.
“You forgot something,” the manager said. He stood in the doorway holding my portable typewriter. It startled me, not because it was there, but because I had completely forgotten it. He placed it on the table and I thanked him. Closing the door, I opened a suitcase and took out a copy of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger. It was a treasured piece, constantly with me since the day I stole it from the Boulder library. I had read it so many times that I could recite it. But it did not matter now. Nothing mattered.
I stretched out on the bed and slept. It was twilight when I awakened and turned on the light. I felt better, no longer tired. I went to the typewriter and sat before it. My thought was to write a sentence, a single perfect sentence. If I could write one good sentence I could write two and if I could write two I could write three, and if I could write three I could write forever. But suppose I failed? Suppose I had lost all of my beautiful talent? Suppose it had burned up in the fire of Biff Newhouse smashing my nose or Helen Brownell dead forever? What would happen to me? Would I go to Abe Marx and become a busboy again? I had seventeen dollars in my wallet. Seventeen dollars and the fear of writing. I sat erect before the typewriter and blew on my fingers. Please God, please Knut Hamsun, don’t desert me now. I started to write and I wrote:
“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax—
Of cabbages—and kings—”
I looked at it and wet my lips. It wasn’t mine, but what the hell, a man had to start someplace.
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.
Meanwhile, Fante had been occupied extensively in screen-writing. 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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BY JOHN FANTE
AVAILABLE FROM ECCO
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
John Fante: Selected Letters
The Big Hunger: Stories, 1932–1959
The John Fante Reader
Copyright
DREAMS FROM BUNKER HILL. Copyright © 1982 by John 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, down-loaded, 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.
First Ecco edition published 2002.
Library of Congress has catalogued a previous edition as:
Fante, John, 1909–1983
Dreams from Bunker Hill.
I. Title.
PS3511.A594D7 813'.52 81-15533
AACR2
ISBN 0-87685-529-X
ISBN 0-87685-528-1 (pbk.)
EPub Edition © March 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-201306-4
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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