by John Fante
“You’re fired,” he said, handing me a paycheck.
I had been with the Toyo Fish Company for two weeks and two days. The check was in full payment for the third week.
“A little bonus,” Coletti said.
What now? A man who could not even shovel fish fertilizer, where did I fit in the world? I remembered another lifetime, the holy hours with Dostoyevsky, and I knew it could never be that way again. A janitor, maybe? A little tobacco shop? A bellhop? My grandfather, my father’s father. He had been an itinerant knife-sharpener in Abruzzi. Was that my destiny too? Suddenly I wanted to go home, to my father’s house, to my mother’s arms, to her minestrone, to my old bed, to lie there the rest of my life. But it was impossible. How could I face them? I had written a few letters home those first days—all fabrications, all lies. I could never confront them now.
It was good timing. I arrived in San Elmo three hours after the flu hit me. My mother turned from the kitchen sink to find me in the doorway.
“Henry! My God, what happened?”
She put me to bed. She brought hot soup. She called Dr. Maselli. He left antibiotics. I wakened and my father looked down at me.
“How do you feel?”
“Great,” I said.
“How long you gonna stay?”
“Long as I can.”
“You wanna work for me?”
“Not right this moment.”
“Sleep. We’ll talk later.”
I ate and slept. Sometimes I slept and ate. Then my colon tightened. My mother brought me an enema bag. The potion didn’t work. She brought another. I locked the bathroom door and applied it. Success! It roared from me. On the other side of the door my mother applauded. “Thank God, oh, thank God!”
It was as if the purge had burst away all that troubled me—the poisons of the body, the abominations of the soul. In the morning I felt clean and pure. I set up a bridge table by the window and started to write.
I wrote in longhand, on lined paper in a grade school tablet, for of typewriters I knew nothing nor cared. My penmanship sufficed, for neat it was, painstaking and clean. In two days it was done: a short story about the Toyo Fish Company, the boys and girls who worked there, and of a love affair between my boss Jose and a Mexican girl. When it was done I paused to see what I had wrought. No, it was not Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I didn’t know what it was. A pastiche. It was Jack London, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Hemingway, Steinbeck and Scott Fitzgerald. It even showed traces of Henry Molise. A marvel, a thing of beauty. What to do with it? Where could I realize the most money? The Saturday Evening Post, of course. I sent it off, tablet and all.
It was returned so quickly I wondered if it had ever left town and gone all the way to Philadelphia and back. I smiled at the rejection slip. It didn’t matter. I had another story ready to mail. The new one went off to The Saturday Evening Post, the other to Collier’s. In two months—fending off the old man with one hand and writing with the other—I completed five stories about the cannery, about Los Angeles harbor, about Filipinos and Mexicans. Not a word of appreciation from the Post or Collier’s. Not a human written line acknowledging my existence. Minutely I examined every page of the rejected manuscripts. Not so much as a fingerprint or smudge, not a mark. A bad time. The old man watched me as he would an unwanted dog that had to be dealt with, a dog that ate too much and left fur on the sofa. There was a time when he growled because I read too much. Now he snarled because I wrote too much. It came down to that last valiant effort. I finished the story of Crazy Hernandez and rushed it to the Post. With it went my last hopes for escaping brick and stone and cement. The story sped back even faster than the others, it seemed, and I sat on the porch steps and tore open the brown envelope. I got a shock. There was a letter affixed to the manuscript. It read:
Dear Mr. Molise:
What have you got against the typewriter? If you will type this manuscript on regulars 8½ × 11 inch paper I shall be glad to look at it again. The printer would never touch it in its present form.
Sincerely yours,
I forced myself to walk slowly to the San Elmo Journal. There was this exploding heartbeat in my throat, the fear I would drop in the street with the story of Crazy Hernandez clutched in my arms. I handed it to Art Cohen, the Journal editor and my high school English instructor. He led me to a typewriter in the rear of the office and sat me before it. For half an hour he instructed me on the operation of a typewriter. Then I was on my own. It had taken me two days to write the Crazy Hernandez story. It took me ten days to type it without errors. What matter, ten days? When the check came I would go to San Francisco and find a room in North Beach. I would buy a typewriter, set it up before a window overlooking the bay, and write. Best of all, I wouldn’t have to worry about carrying a hod, mixing mud, and mucking around in wet concrete.
What’s that, Dostoyevsky? You don’t approve of The Saturday Evening Post? Well, let me tell you something, Fyodor. I saw your journalistic pieces of 1875, and frankly, they were pretty tacky and commercial, but they brought you plenty of rubles. So let’s not blush at the Post story. You have done worse in your time…
I lay there in the darkness, in the cradle of my mother’s mattress breathing the sweet essence of her hair, and there he was again, my tireless old man, still trying to drag me into those deadly mountains where the concrete waited and some fool wanted a smokehouse built. So it had come down to this. After thirty years I had seen the light. I was a hod carrier at long last.
11
NOISE WAKENED ME in the morning—the shuffle of thick shoes past my window, the tumble of lumber, bellowing voices, laughter. The sun was up, hot and full of mischief as it tried to pierce the blinds.
I found an old flannel robe of my mother’s in the closet and walked out on the front porch. Zarlingo, Cavallaro and my father were hauling building materials to the Datsun out front and lifting them into the camper—planks, shovels, mortarboards, a wheelbarrow, tools. They sweated in the morning heat; the back of Papa’s khaki shirt was soaked down the spine, his face as red as a rose.
They paused at the truck to wipe their faces and sip beer from cans. The sky was a cloudless sheet of blue fire, tremulous, vast. It was a minute or so before they saw me.
“Ain’t you dressed yet?” my father said.
“No, I ain’t dressed yet.”
“Why don’t you get dressed like everybody else?”
“I just woke up. Do you mind?”
“You workin’ for me or not?”
“We’re not in the mountains yet.”
Zarlingo looked inside the camper.
“Oh shit. We’re outa beer.”
“Let’s go down to the Roma,” Papa said. “I like that tap beer better.” He squinted at me through the burning sunlight. “Put on some clothes. That’s your mother’s robe. Take it off. We leave in an hour. You be ready.”
They climbed into the cab, Zarlingo behind the wheel. I didn’t like the look of it. The air was shimmering with diabolic vibrations. As the camper moved off I yelled. Zarlingo braked to a stop and I walked to the car. Nick put his head out the window.
“What’s the matter now?”
I nodded at his two friends. “Are these two winos working for you too? If they are, I resign right now.”
“Resign?” he exploded. “You ain’t even started!”
“Well, are they, or are they not?”
Zarlingo put a placating hand on Papa’s knee to defuse him. “Let me talk to the lad, Nick.” He turned to me. “Look, sonny. We’re not working for your dad.”
I said, “Don’t call me sonny.”
“We’re just trying to give him a hand,” he went on. “Okay, buster? So why don’t you shut up and bug off?”
“Mannaggia!” my father howled, tumbling from the car and facing me nose to nose, splashing me with spit. “What are you tryin’ to do to me? These fellas are my friends. They’re doin’ me a favor, hauling all my stuff to the job free of charge, so what right yo
u got to talk like that? Use your head. Show some respect.”
Injured and affronted, Zarlingo and Cavallaro looked straight ahead. I didn’t care how Papa defended them, they were mean, malevolent old bastards and it was impossible to be civil to them, but I said it anyway, merely to make peace.
“I’m sorry.”
They remained rigid and outraged. My father got back into the cab. “Let’s get outa here,” he said. Zarlingo shifted gears, and as the car moved off Papa stuck his head out the window.
“Get dressed, goddamnit. And take off that robe.”
I shuddered from it, those dreadful vibrations: there was something stupid and inexorable about the whole matter, a trap, a dark hole alive with rattlesnakes. Then and there I should have fled the scene, even in my mother’s old flannel robe I should have grabbed the first bus out of town.
Instead I showered and shaved and put on the ancient garments of my youth—corduroys, a sweatshirt, a pair of misshapen hobnail boots. How bizarre it was, the feeling inside those old clothes, a snake shedding his skin only to find an older skin beneath. I felt like an old man of sixteen.
They puzzled my mother. She didn’t care for them.
“You look too young,” she said.
“They feel crazy.”
I wanted to say they felt like the garments of someone who had died, the time of my young manhood, a time of stress and crisis, the family poverty in the midst of my father’s prosperity, the rage at him, the conviction that God did not rule the world after all, the hunger to lust and achieve, to jump the fences of home and town, to change myself into somebody else, to write, to fuck and write.
Eating breakfast I sensed a change of perspective growing out of the change of clothing—the same knives and forks of my youth, the same plates, the smooth worn handle of the same bread knife, the aging crucifix hanging above the stove—all things old and smooth and soft as the inside of my mother’s hand. She watched as I sipped coffee, her eyes troubled, uncertain of my identity.
“You don’t have to work for your father. Maybe you shouldn’t.”
“I know.”
“Do what’s right—for yourself.”
The morality of it was not the question. What mattered was that I had seen death glowing through the face of an old man clinging fiercely to life. No wonder he was stubborn, capricious, self-serving and touched with madness. But he was still my father. If I turned from him in his last cry for achievement it might bring a swifter death, and I did not want that shadow over the rest of my life. I had never actually refused to go to the mountains with him. I had simply allowed him and my mother to draw me into the plan. My father was entitled to this last paltry triumph, this little house of stone in the Sierras.
12
WITH HALF AN HOUR remaining before we took off, I decided to surprise my wife by visiting her mother. Hilda Dietrich was eighty, living alone in a jewel box of a white house a few blocks away. The house was a hundred years old, quite small, a veranda of white pillars encircling it, honeysuckle and climbing roses scaling the trellised portico. The grounds were so clean and neat they resembled a theatrical set. From the white picket fence in front to the tall eugenia hedge bordering the alley there spread an acre of dicondra lawn surrounding flowerbeds and birdbaths. Not a twig or fallen leaf marred that sweep of grass. Regionally the place was famous. Everyone took pictures of it, a California original, passionately cared for by a proud old lady who had made it her life’s work.
Hilda Dietrich and I had one common bond that held us together forever: we loathed each other. She had never forgiven Harriet for becoming my wife, and I had never forgiven her for being my wife’s mother.
It was my Italian side that Hilda found unbearable. San Elmo has changed now, but forty years ago the town was one-third Italian. The bluebloods of the region, the Protestant-Americans—the Schmids, the Eicheldorns, the Kisbergs and the Dietrichs—suddenly found themselves horrified neighbors of noisy Dagos working the tracks of the Southern Pacific. They propagated large and offensively dark families and built a Roman church to administer to their primitive superstitions.
With the coming of Prohibition, many of these guineas moved into the bootleg trade. They bought land, cultivated vineyards, and achieved an annoying respectability despite some bombings and a couple of gang killings. In 1926 the front of the Café Roma was blown out, and in 1931 a hood named Petresini was shot down on the corner of Lincoln and Vernon. The bullets that killed Petresini lodged deeply into a telephone pole at the scene, and every generation of kids thereafter probed the bulletholes like Saint Thomas putting his doubting finger into the Savior’s wounds.
By Franklin Roosevelt’s time Hilda Dietrich was forty, a housewife and mother, married to the Reverend Herman Dietrich, pastor of the Lutheran church. Like her husband, who said as much from his pulpit, Mrs. Dietrich was fully persuaded that Italians were creatures with African blood, that all Italians carried knives, and that the country was in the dutches of the Mafia. It was no extremist theory. A lot of worried people believed it, particularly Italian-Americans.
I met Harriet Dietrich the year after her father died, in the summer of my first book. She was home from Berkeley, working as an assistant in the public library. I autographed the two library copies and she clutched them to her breast and praised my work, the nobility of purpose, the fresh style, et cetera. I was better than Faulkner, she insisted, better than Hemingway. I agreed and went reeling out of the library, intoxicated. What a lovely mind she had! So well informed, so perceptive, with an overview of world literature that took my breath away. As night fell four hours later I was standing on her front porch, eager to continue our stimulating conversation.
Since I had not been invited, she was surprised to see me, smiling her welcome and opening the door to a small Victorian parlor with red velvet chairs and a love seat. In a whisper she explained that her mother had already gone to bed in the next room. I allowed this to alarm me, and I apologized and made for the front door, knowing she would stop me, which she promptly did, steering me back to the love seat, where I kept looking at her noble, smooth, sensuous bottom and wondering if her pubic hair was as blond as her shoulder-length tresses. Her voice was as soft as the night wind, and I fancied her cherry mouth whispering, “Fuck me, please fuck me, Henry!” I saw her golden knees crossing and uncrossing under a short skirt and sighed at the thought of being trapped between them in a scissor lock. With every breath her bosom lifted and I toyed with the reverie of raising her breasts out of her dress in some dramatic way, as if lifting golden goblets toward the sky. Surely I would ball this woman, for already we were beneath each other’s skin, slithering for positions. It was not love, but lust was better.
Then Mrs. Dietrich called from her bedroom, sharply, irritably. “Harriet, will you come here, please?”
Harriet looked threatened, smiling nervously as she excused herself and opened the bedroom door. The room was in darkness. As Harriet closed the door there was a buzz of whispered angry voices. In a moment or two Harriet emerged, eyes blazing with anger. She avoided my glance and calmed herself.
“Something wrong?” I asked.
She smiled. “I hate to ask you this, but are you…armed?”
“You mean, carrying a gun?”
It was so absurd that she laughed. “Mother says you—you might have a knife.”
“Why?”
“You’re Italian.”
1 said, “Oh, shit, she’s crazy.”
The bedroom door opened and Mrs. Dietrich stood there in a housecoat over her nightie, her feet in slippers. It was said that she had been one of the town’s most beautiful women. Not so, then. She had jowls and the cords in her neck protruded, but her figure was rounded and attractive. Raising her arm imperiously, she pointed to the front door.
“Out!” she demanded. “Out of my house, young man, or I shall call the police.”
I glanced at Harriet. “What’s this all about?”
“Please go,” she said,
taking my hand. “Please.”
I walked to the door with her. “What’s going on here?”
Gently she pushed me out on the porch. “I’ll see you tomorrow at the library.”
“Close that door,” Mrs. Dietrich snapped.
Harriet was brave, but she had been taught to fear her intractable mother. Mrs. Dietrich of course forbade her to ever see me again, so we were forced to go underground. It wasn’t easy in Placer County. There were Dietrichs everywhere—in towns, on farms and in mountain settlements. Driving separate cars, we used to meet in madhouses, on back roads, in abandoned farmhouses, in orchards and vineyards.
If a Dietrich cousin or uncle spotted us, a report was telephoned to the queen in San Elmo. It was sport at first, but after two months we tired of it. One morning in July I pulled up in front of the public library, took Harriet by the arm, and led her down to the car. We drove to the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe and were married by a justice of the peace. We spent our honeymoon at a hotel beside the lake, and the following morning we started back to San Elmo for a confrontation with La Dietrich. It was raining hard as we drew up in front of the Dietrich house.