Ask the Dust by John Fante Page A

will whoop it up for the sunny south. You’ll eat hamburgers year after year and live in dusty, vermin-infested apartments and hotels, but every morning you’ll see the mighty sun, the eternal blue of the sky, and the streets will be full of sleek women you never will possess, and the hot semitropical nights will reek of romance you’ll never have, but you’ll still be in paradise, boys, in the land of sunshine.
    As for the folks back home, you can lie to them, because they hate the truth anyway, they won’t have it, because soon or late they want to come out to paradise, too. You can’t fool the folks back home, boys. They know what Southern California’s like. After all they read the papers, they look at the picture magazine glutting the newsstands of every corner in America. They’ve seen pictures of the movie stars’ homes. You can’t tell them anything about California.
    Lying in my bed I thought about them, watched the blobs of red light from the St. Paul Hotel jump in and out of my room, and I was miserable, for tonight I had acted like them. Smith and Parker and Jones, I had never been one of them. Ah, Camilla! When I was a kid back home in Colorado it was Smith and Parker and Jones who hurt me with their hideous names, called me Wop and Dago and Greaser, and their children hurt me, just as I hurt you tonight. They hurt me so much I could never become one of them, drove me to books, drove me within myself, drove me to run away from that Colorado town, and sometimes, Camilla, when I see their faces I feel the hurt all over again, the old ache there, and sometimes I am glad they are here, dying in the sun, uprooted, tricked by their heartlessness, the same faces, the same set, hard mouths, faces from my home town, fulfilling the emptiness of their lives under a blazing sun.
    I see them in the lobbies of hotels, I see them sunning in theparks, and limping out of ugly little churches, their faces bleak from proximity with their strange gods, out of Aimee’s Temple, out of the Church of the Great I Am.
    I have seen them stagger out of their movie palaces and blink their empty eyes in the face of reality once more, and stagger home, to read the Times , to find out what’s going on in the world. I have vomited at their newspapers, read their literature, observed their customs, eaten their food, desired their women, gaped at their art. But I am poor, and my name ends with a soft vowel, and they hate me and my father, and my father’s father, and they would have my blood and put me down, but they are old now, dying in the sun and in the hot dust of the road, and I am young and full of hope and love for my country and my times, and when I say Greaser to you it is not my heart that speaks, but the quivering of an old wound, and I am ashamed of the terrible thing I have done.

Chapter Seven
    I am thinking of the Alta Loma Hotel, remembering the people who lived there. I remember my first day there. I remember that I walked into the dark lobby carrying two suitcases, one of them filled with copies of The Little Dog Laughed . It was a long time ago, but I remember it well. I had come by bus, dusty to the skin, the dust of Wyoming and Utah and Nevada in my hair and in my ears.
    â€œI want a cheap room,” I said.
    The landlady had white hair. Around her neck was a high net collar fitting tightly like a corset. She was in her seventies, a tall woman who increased her height by rising on tiptoe and peering at me over her glasses.
    â€œDo you have a job?” she said.
    â€œI’m a writer,” I said. “Look, I’ll show you.”
    I opened my suitcase and got out a copy. “I wrote that,” I told her. I was eager in those days, very proud. “I’ll give you a copy,” I said. “I’ll autograph it for you.”
    I took a fountain pen from the desk, it was dry and I had to dip it, and I rolled my tongue around thinking of something nice