Spitball Army

The lean days, blue skies with never a cloud, a sea of blue day after day, the sun floating through it.  The days of plenty – plenty of worries, plenty of oranges.  Eat them in bed, eat them for lunch, push them down for dinner. Oranges, five cents a dozen.  Sunshine in the sky, sun juice in my stomach.  Down at the Japanese market he saw me coming, that bullet-faced smiling Japanese, and he reached for a paper sack.  A generous man, he gave me fifteen, sometimes twenty for a nickel.

“You like banana?”  Sure, so he gave me a couple of bananas.  A pleasant innovation, orange juice and bananas.  “You like apple?”  Sure, so he gave me some apples.  Here was something new: oranges and apples.  “You like peaches?”  Indeed, and I carried the brown sack back to my room.  An interesting innovation, peaches and oranges.  My teeth tore them to pulp, the juices skewering and whimpering at the bottom of my stomach.  It was so sad down there in my stomach.  There was much weeping, and little gloomy clouds of gas pinched my heart.

My plight drove me to the typewriter.  I sat before it, overwhelmed with grief for Arturo Bandini.  Sometimes an idea floated harmlessly through the room.  It was like a small white bird.  It meant no ill-will.  It only wanted to help me, dear little bird.  But I would strike at it, hammer it out across the keyboard, and it would die on my hands.

What could be the matter with me?  When I was a boy I prayed to St. Teresa for a new fountain pen.  My prayer was answered.  Anyway, I did get a new fountain pen.  Now I prayed to St. Teresa again.  Please, sweet and lovely saint, gimme an idea.  But she has deserted me, all the gods have deserted me, and like Huysmans I stand alone, my fists clenched, tears in my eyes.  If someone only loved me, even a bug, even a mouse, but that too belonged to the past; even Pedro had forsaken me now that the best I could offer him was orange peel.

– from Ask the Dust (1939)

John Fante (1909-1983) wrote pulp-noir fiction that was largely autobiographical.  The narrator of Ask the Dust, Arturo Bandini, is struggling at a career as a writer in depression-era Los Angeles.