Ask the Dust by John Fante

Maybe that business about the Blessed Sacrament wasn’t exactly true; maybe it didn’t really happen. But my God, what psychological values! What prose! What sheer beauty!
    As soon as I got to my room I sat down before my typewriter and planned my revenge. An article, a scathing attack upon the stupidity of the Church. I pecked out the title: The Catholic Church Is Doomed . I hammered it out furiously, one page after another, until there were six. Then I paused to read it. The stuff was awful, ludicrous. I tore it up and threw myself on the bed. I still hadn’t written a poem to Camilla. As I lay there, inspiration came. I wrote it out from memory:
    I have forgot much, Camilla! gone with the wind ,
    Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng ,
    Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind ;
    But I was desolate and sick with an old passion ,
    Yes, all the time, because the dance was long ;
    I have been faithful to thee, Camilla, in my fashion .
    Arturo Bandini .
    I sent it by telegraph, proud of it, watched the telegraph clerk read it, beautiful poem, my poem to Camilla, a bit of immortality from Arturo to Camilla, and I paid the telegraph man and walked down to my place in the dark doorway, and there I waited. The same boy floated by on his bicycle. I watched him deliver it, watched Camilla read it in the middle of the floor, watched her shrug and rip it to pieces, saw the pieces floating to the sawdust on the floor. I shook my head and walked away. Even the poetry of Ernest Dowson had no effect upon her, not even Dowson.
    Ah well, the hell with you Camilla. I can forget you. I have money. These streets are full of things you cannot give me. So down to Main Street and to Fifth Street, to the long dark bars, to the King Edward Cellar, and there a girl with yellow hair and sickness in her smile. Her name was Jean, she was thin and tubercular, but she was hard too, so anxious to get my money, her languid mouth for my lips, her long fingers at my trousers, her sickly lovely eyes watching every dollar bill.
    â€œSo your name is Jean,” I said. “Well, well, well, a pretty name.” We’ll dance, Jean. We’ll swing around, and you don’t know it, you beauty in a blue gown, but you’re dancing with a freak, an outcast from the world of man, neither fish, fowl, nor good red herring. And we drank and we danced and we drank again. Good fellow Bandini, so Jean called the boss. “This is Mr. Bandini. This is Mr. Schwartz.” Very good, shake hands. “Nice place you got, Schwartz, nice girls.”
    One drink, two drinks, three drinks. What’s that you’re drinking Jean? I tasted it, that brownish stuff, looked like whiskey, must have been whiskey, such a face she made, her sweet face so contorted. But it wasn’t whiskey, it was tea, plain tea, forty cents a slug. Jean, a little liar, trying to fool a great author. Don’t fool me,Jean. Not Bandini, lover of man and beast alike. So take this, five dollars, put it away, don’t drink Jean, just sit here, only sit and let my eyes search your face because your hair is blonde and not dark, you are not like her, you are sick and you are from down there in Texas and you have a crippled mother to support, and you don’t make very much money, only twenty cents a drink, you’ve only made ten dollars from Arturo Bandini tonight, you poor little girl, poor little starving girl with the sweet eyes of a baby and the soul of a thief. Go to your sailor boys, honey. They don’t have the ten dollars but they’ve got what I haven’t got, me, Bandini, neither fish, fowl nor good red herring, goodnight Jean, goodnight.
    And here was another place and another girl. Oh, how lonely she was, from away back in Minnesota. A good family too. Sure, honey. Tell my tired ears about your good family. They owned a lot of property, and then the depression came. Well, how sad, how tragic. And now you work down here in a Fifth