The John Fante Reader by John Fante
“Buenos Aires, Argentina.”
“Your mother?”
At last I can shout with the gusto of truth.
“Denver!” Aye, just like a conductor.
Casually, by way of conversation, he asks: “You speak Italian?”
“Nah! Not a word.”
“Too bad,” he says.
“You’re nuts,” I think.
VI
That semester I wait on table to defray my tuition fee. Trouble ahead; the chef and his assistants in the kitchen are all Italians. They know at once that I am of the breed. I ignore the chef’s friendly overtures, loathing him from the first. He understands why, and we become enemies. Every word he uses has a knife in it. His remarks cut me to pieces. After two months I can stand it no longer in the kitchen, and so I write a long letter to my mother; I am losing weight, I write; if you don’t let me quit this job, I’ll get sick and flunk my tests. She telegraphs me some money and tells me to quit at once; oh, I feel so sorry for you, my boy; I didn’t dream it would be so hard on you.
I decide to work just one more evening, to wait on table for just one more meal. That evening, after the meal, when the kitchen is deserted save for the cook and his assistants, I remove my apron and take my stand across the kitchen from him, staring at him. This is my moment. Two months I have waited for this moment. There is a knife stuck into the chopping block. I pick it up, still staring. I want to hurt the cook, square things up.
He sees me, and he says: “Get out of here, Wop!”
An assistant shouts: “Look out, he’s got a knife!”
“You won’t throw it, Wop,” the cook says. I am not thinking of throwing it, but since he says I won’t, I do. It goes over his head and strikes the wall and drops with a clatter to the floor. He picks it up and chases me out of the kitchen. I run, thanking God I didn’t hit him.
That year the football team is made up of Irish and Italian boys. The linemen are Irish, and we in the backfield are four Italians. We have a good team and win a lot of games, and my teammates are excellent players who are unselfish and work together as one man. But I hate my three fellow-players in the backfield; because of our nationality we seem ridiculous. The team makes a captain of me, and I call signals and see to it my fellow-Italians in the backfield do as little scoring as possible. I hog the play.
The school journal and the town’s sport pages begin to refer to us as the Wop Wonders. I think it an insult. Late one afternoon, at the close of an important game, a number of students leave the main grandstand and group themselves at one end of the field, to improvise some yells. They give three big ones for the Wop Wonders. It sickens me. I can feel my stomach move; and after that game I turn in my suit and quit the team.
I am a bad Latinist. Disliking the language, I do not study, and therefore I flunk my examinations regularly. Now a student comes to me and tells me that it is possible to drop Latin from my curriculum if I follow his suggestion, which is that I fail deliberately in the next few examinations, fail hopelessly. If I do this, the student says, the Jesuits will bow to my stupidity and allow me to abandon the language.
This is an agreeable suggestion. I follow it out. But it backtracks, for the Jesuits are wise fellows. They see what I’m doing, and they laugh and tell me that I am not clever enough to fool them, and that I must keep on studying Latin, even if it takes me twenty years to pass. Worse, they double my assignments and I spend my recreation time with Latin syntax. Before examinations in my junior year the Jesuit who instructs me calls me to his room and says:
“It is a mystery to me that a thoroughbred Italian like yourself should have any trouble with Latin. The language is in your blood and, believe me, you’re a darned poor Wop.”
Abbastanza! I go upstairs and lock my door and sit down with my book in front of me, my Latin book, and I study like a wild man, tearing crazily into the stuff until, lo, what is this? What am I studying here? Sure enough, it’s a lot like the Italian my grandmother taught me so long ago—this Latin, it isn’t so hard, after all. I pass the examination, I pass it with such an incredibly fine grade that my instructor thinks there is knavery somewhere.
Two weeks before graduation I get sick and go to the infirmary and am quarantined there. I lie in bed and feed my grudges. I bite my thumbs and ponder old grievances. I am running a high fever, and I can’t sleep. I think about the principal. He was my close friend during my first two years at the school, but in my third year, last year, he was transferred to another school. I lie in bed thinking of the day we met again in this, the last year. We met again on his return that September, in the principal’s room. He said hello to the boys, this fellow and that, and then he turned to me, and said:
“And you, the Wop! So you’re still with us.”
Coming from the mouth of the priest, the word had a lumpish sound that shook me all over. I felt the eyes of everyone, and I heard a giggle. So that’s how it is! I lie in bed thinking of the priest and now of the fellow who giggled.
All of a sudden I jump out of bed, tear the fly-leaf from a book, find a pencil, and write a note to the priest. I write: “Dear Father: I haven’t forgotten your insult. You called me a Wop last September. If you don’t apologize right away there’s going to be trouble.” I call the brother in charge of the infirmary and tell him to deliver the note to the priest.
After a while I hear the priest’s footsteps rising on the stairs. He comes to the door of my room, opens it, looks at me for a long time, not speaking, but only looking querulously. I wait for him to come in and apologize, for this is a grand moment for me. But he closes the door quietly and walks away. I am astonished. A double insult!
I am well again on the night of graduation. On the platform the principal makes a speech and then begins to distribute the diplomas. We’re supposed to say: “Thank you,” when he gives them to us. So thank you, and thank you, and thank you, everyone says in his turn. But when he gives me mine, I look squarely at him, just stand there and look, and I don’t say anything, and from that day we never speak to each other again.
The following September I enroll at the university.
“Where was your father born?” asks the registrar.
“Buenos Aires, Argentina.”
Sure, that’s it. The same theme, with variations.
—The Wine of Youth
DURING MY SECOND YEAR at the university I fell in love with a girl who worked in a clothing store. Her name was Agnes, and I wanted to marry her. She moved to North Platte, Nebraska, for a better job, and I quit the university to be near her. I hitchhiked from Boulder to North Platte and arrived dusty and broke and triumphant at the rooming house where Agnes lived. We sat on the porch swing and she was not glad to see me.
“I don’t want to marry you,” she said. “I don’t want to see you any more. That’s why I’m here, so we don’t see each other.”
“I’ll get a job,” I insisted. “We’ll have a family.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake.”
“Don’t you want a family? Don’t you like kids?”
She got quickly to her feet. “Go home, Arturo. Please go home. Don’t think about me any more. Go back to school. Learn something.” She was crying.
“I can lay brick,” I said, moving to her. She threw her arms around me, and planted a wet kiss on my cheek, then pushed me away.
“Go home, Arturo. Please.” She went inside and closed the door.
I walked down to the railroad tracks and swung aboard a freight train bound for Denver. From there I took another freight to Boulder and home. The next day I went to the job where my father was laying brick.
“I want to talk to you,” I said. He came down from the scaffold and we walked to a pile of lumber.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
“I quit school.”
“Why?”
“I’m not cut out for it.”
His face twisted bitterly. “What are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know. I haven?
“Jesus, you’re crazy.”
I became a bum in my home town. I loafed around. I took a job pulling weeds, but it was hard and I quit. Another job, washing windows. I barely got through it. I looked all over Boulder for work, but the streets were full of young, unemployed men. The only job in town was delivering newspapers. It paid fifty cents a day. I turned it down. I leaned against walls in the pool halls. I stayed away from home. I was ashamed to eat the food my father and mother provided. I always waited until my father walked out. My mother tried to cheer me. She made me pecan pie and ravioli.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “You wait and see. Something will happen. It’s in my prayers.”
I went to the library. I looked at the magazines, at the pictures in them. One day I went to the bookshelves, and pulled out a book. It was Winesburg, Ohio. I sat at a long mahogany table and began to read. All at once my world turned over. The sky fell in. The book held me. The tears came. My heart beat fast. I read until my eyes burned. I took the book home. I read another Anderson. I read and I read, and I was heartsick and lonely and in love with a book, many books, until it came naturally, and I sat there with a pencil and a long tablet, and tried to write, until I felt I could not go on because the words would not come as they did in Anderson, they only came like drops of blood from my heart.
—Dreams from Bunker Hill
THE ODYSSEY OF A WOP
VII
TIME PASSES, and so do school days. I am sitting on a wall along the plaza in Los Angeles, watching a Mexican fiesta across the street. A man comes along and lifts himself to the wall beside me, and asks if I have a cigarette. I have, and, lighting the cigarette, he makes conversation with me, and we talk of casual things until the fiesta is over. Then we get down from the wall and, still talking, go walking through the Los Angeles Tenderloin. This man needs a shave and his clothes do not fit him; it’s plain that he’s a bum. He tells one lie upon another, and not one is well told. But I am lonesome in this town, and a willing listener.
We step into a restaurant for coffee. Now he becomes intimate. He has bummed his way from Chicago to Los Angeles, and has come in search of his sister; he has her address, but she is not at it, and for two weeks he has been looking for her in vain. He talks on and on about this sister, seeming to gyrate like a buzzard over her, hinting to me that I should ask some questions about her. He wants me to touch off the fuse that will release his feelings.
So I ask: “Is she married?”
And then he rips into her, hammer and tongs. Even if he does find her, he will not live with her. What kind of a sister is she to let him walk these streets without a dime in his pocket, and she married to a man who has plenty of money and can give him a job? He thinks she has deliberately given him a false address so that he will not find her, and when he gets his hands on her he’s going to wring her neck. In the end, after he has completely demolished her; he does exactly what I think he is going to do.
He asks: “Have you got a sister?”
I tell him yes, and he waits for my opinion of her; but he doesn’t get it.
We meet again a week later.
He has found his sister. Now he begins to praise her. She has induced her husband to give him a job, and tomorrow he goes to work as a waiter in his brother-in-law’s restaurant. He tells me the address, but I do not think more of it beyond the fact that it must be somewhere in the Italian quarter.
And so it is, and by a strange coincidence I know his brother-in-law, Rocco Saccone, an old friend of my people and a paesano of my father’s. I am in Rocco’s place one night a fortnight later. Rocco and I are speaking in Italian when the man I have met on the plaza steps out of the kitchen, an apron over his legs. Rocco calls him and he comes over, and Rocco introduces him as his brother-in-law from Chicago. We shake hands.
“We’ve met before,” I say, but the plaza man doesn’t seem to want this known, for he lets go my hand quickly and goes behind the counter, pretending to be busy with something back there. Oh, he’s bluffing; you can see that.
In a loud voice, Rocco says to me: “That man is a skunk. He’s ashamed of his own flesh and blood.” He turns to the plaza man. “Ain’t you?”
“Oh, yeah?” the plaza man sneers.
“How do you mean—he’s ashamed? How do you mean?”
“Ashamed of being an Italian,” Rocco says.
“Oh, yeah?” from the plaza man.
“That’s all he knows,” Rocco says. “Oh, yeah? That’s all he knows. Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah? That’s all he knows.”
“Oh, yeah?” the plaza man says again.
“Yah,” Rocco says, his face blue. “Animale codardo!”
The plaza man looks at me with peaked eyebrows, and he doesn’t know it, he standing there with his black, liquid eyes, he doesn’t know that he’s as good as a god in his waiter’s apron; for he is indeed a god, a miracle worker; no, he doesn’t know; no one knows; just the same, he is that—he, of all people. Standing there and looking at him, I feel like my grandfather and my father and the Jesuit cook and Rocco; I seem to have come home, and I am surprised that this return, which I have somehow always expected, should come so quietly, without trumpets and thunder.
“If I were you, I’d get rid of him,” I say to Rocco.
“Oh, yeah?” the plaza man says again.
I’d like to paste him. But that won’t do any good. There’s no sense in hammering your own corpse.
—The Wine of Youth
MY FIRST DAY IN LOS ANGELES I took a job washing dishes at Clifton’s Cafeteria. After a few days I was promoted to busboy and was sacked for “socializing with the public,” in this case a girl carrying a volume of Edna St. Vincent Millay who invited me to her table for coffee and a talk on poetry.
Next day I found another dishwashing job at a saloon on the corner of Fifth and Main. My room was upstairs for four dollars a week, shared by another dishwasher. His name was Hernandez and he was crazy. He was the first writer I ever met, a tall, laughing Mexican sitting on the bed with a typewriter in his lap, guffawing at every line he wrote. His project was a book called Fun and Profit in Dishwashing. It was as mad as Hernandez himself. I used to fall asleep listening to him read the manuscript, convulsing with pleasure. One of his chapters was “The Mystery of Hot Water,” another, “Clean Hands Make Clean Minds.”
But the job was exhausting, the floor always submerged from leaking pipes, and the food inedible. I quit to work in the garment district pushing dress racks and running errands for everyone. I had a dozen bosses who kept me rushing after coffee, sandwiches, newspapers and a hundred other trifles. One of them owned an independent cab service and offered me a job driving at night. I accepted though I knew nothing of the huge, complicated city. For eight hours I cruised downtown Los Angeles that first night without catching a single fare. My boss assured me that things would improve when the dry spell ended, and to pray for rain.
The following night I had my first customers, a black man and his girl. The man asked to be driven to Ninety-sixth and Central Avenue. As I consulted a map of the city he said, “You mean to tell me you don’t know where Ninety-sixth and Central is?” I told him I was new in town. “I’ll show you the way,” he said. “Down one block and turn left.”
For two hours I followed his directions, all the way to San Bernardino, where I was told to stop in a tractless, houseless wasteland without street lights or sidewalks. I felt the barrel of a pistol in my ear as he ordered me out of the car. His girlfriend searched me and took all I possessed, nine dollars. They drove off, leaving me there in a place resembling Death Valley.
As daylight pulsed in the east, a police car came up silently and found me walking toward what appeared to be the lights of a distant city. I spent three hours in the San Bernardino Police Station being grilled mercilessly by two detectives who suspected me of being AWOL or draft-dodging. The 4-F status of my draft card did not impress them. They fingerprinted me and ran a check. At noo
I got out on the street and began to ask passers-by. Nobody seemed to know how to get out of San Bernardino, so I finally found it myself. I thumbed for an hour before a truck stopped. The driver wasn’t going to Los Angeles but to Wilmington. Good enough. Anything was better than San Bernardino. When I told him of being robbed and arrested he laughed. “Lotsa luck,” he said as he let me off on Wilmington Boulevard.
Wilmington was paranoid, a seaport town in the midst of war. It did not seem to have been laid out so much as dumped out. Big trucks hogged the streets, roaring through crowded intersections where soldiers, sailors and civilians ignored traffic signals in the middle of honking claxons and cursing drivers. I moved with the flow of people, aimlessly following a surge down Avalon Boulevard. I was tired, dirty and dazed, tumbled like a cork along a street of oil derricks, factories, lumberyards, piles of girders and steel pipe, row upon row of army tanks and trucks, pool halls, poker palaces, used-car lots, and even an amusement park with a merry-go-round and a Ferris wheel. The laughter of women in bars flooded the streets. Hustlers leaned in doorways, drunks sat on the curb, smiling cops cruised in bemused attention. Where was I? Liverpool? Singapore? Marseilles? I thought of my father, how he would have loved this singular place—the gambling, the bars, the buildings shooting up on every empty piece of land.
Hunger. I smelled the tomato sauce, the pizza coming from an Italian restaurant. I turned the corner and moved down the alley to the rear of the place. As I knocked on the black screen door a cloud of flies whined away and I saw the face of an Italian woman peering out, a plump woman in her forties, round as a meatball. I’ll work for something to eat, I said. She was startled, frowning. I’m hungry, I said. She opened the door and pointed to three overloaded garbage cans, motioning me to take them outside. I rolled them out among the ecstatic flies. She worked swiftly at a butcher’s table with half a loaf of French bread split down the middle, hollowed out and filled with pastrami and cream cheese. I thanked her and said I was looking for a job. Experienced dishwasher, I said. She opened the door and invited me out. I went away down the alley to a trailer park where a black hose curled like a snake through uncut lawn, and I sat on a trailer hitch eating the sandwich and drinking warm water from the hose.