The Road to Los Angeles by John Fante Read Free Book Online Page A

a job. There was the fifteen cents store. For a long time I stood out in front looking at a pile of peanut brittle in the window. Then I walked in.

    "The manager, please."

    The girl said, "He's downstairs."

    I knew him. His name was Tracey. I walked down the hard stairs, wondering why they were so hard, and at the bottom I saw Mr Tracey. He was fixing his yellow tie at a mirror. A nice man, that Mr Tracey. Admirable taste. A beautiful tie, white shoes, blue shirt. A fine man, a privilege to work for a man like that. He had something; he had el vital . Ah, Bergson! Another great writer was Bergson. "Hello, Mr Tracey."

    "Eh, what do you want?"

    "I was going to ask you —"

    "We have application blanks for that. But it won't do any good. We're all filled up."

    I went back up the hard stairs. What curious stairs! So hard, so precise! Possibly a new invention in stair-making. Ah, mankind! What'll you think of next! Progress. I believe in the reality of Progress. That Tracey. That lowdown, filthy, no-good sonofabitch! Him and his stupid yellow necktie standing in front of a mirror like a goddamn ape: that bourgeois Babbitt scoundrel. A yellow necktie! Imagine it. Oh, he didn't fool me. I knew a thing or two about that fellow. One night I was there, down at the harbor, and I saw him. I hadn't said anything, but I guess I'd seen him down there in his car, potbellied as a pig, with a girl at his side. I saw his fat teeth in the moonlight. He sat there under his belly, a thirty-dollar-a-week moron of a fat Babbitt bastard with a hanging gut and a girl at his side, a slut, a bitch, a whore beside him, a scummy female. Between his fat fingers he held the girl's hand. He seemed ardent in his piggish way, that fat bastard, that stinking, nauseating, thirty-dollar-a-week moron of a rat, with his fat teeth looming in the moonlight, his big pouch squashed against the steering wheel, his dirty eyes fat and ardent with fat ideas of a fat love affair. He wasn't fooling me; he could never fool me. He might fool that girl, but not Arturo Bandini, and under no circumstances would Arturo Bandini ever consent to work for him. Some day there would be a reckoning. He might plead, with his yellow necktie dragging in the dust, he might plead with Arturo Bandini, begging the great Arturo to accept a job, and Arturo Bandini would proudly kick him in the belly and watch him writhe in the dust. He'd pay, he'd pay!

    I went out to the Ford plant. And why not? Ford needs men. Bandini at the Ford Motor Company. A week in one department, three weeks in another, a month in another, six months in another. Two years, and I would be director in chief of the Western Division.

    The pavement wound through white sand, a new road heavy with monoxide gas. In the sand were brown weeds and grasshoppers. Bits of seashell sparkled through the weeds. It was man-made land, flat and in disorder, shacks unpainted, piles of lumber, piles of tin cans, oil derricks and hot dog stands, fruit stands and old men on all sides of the road selling popcorn. Overhead the heavy telephone wires gave off a humming sound whenever there was a lull in the traffic noise. Out of the muddy channel bed came the rich stench of oil and scum and strange cargo.

    I walked along the road with others. They flagged rides with their thumbs. They were beggars with jerking thumbs and pitiful smiles, begging crumbs-on-wheels. No pride. But not I - not Arturo Bandini, with his mighty legs. Not for him this mooching. Let them pass me by! Let them go ninety miles an hour and fill my nose with their exhausts. Some day it would all be different. You will pay for this, all of you, every driver along this road. I will not ride in your automobiles even if you get out and plead with me, and offer me the car to keep as my own, free and without further obligation. I will die on the road first. But my time will come, and then you will see my name in the sky. Then you shall see, every one of you! I am not waving like