The Road to Los Angeles (8 page)

"Of course," I said. "It was nothing. The idiosyncrasies of an artistic stomach. A mere nothing. Something I ate, if you will."

"That's right!"

We walked into the room beyond. The women were still laughing on company time. At the door Shorty Naylor turned around and put a scowl on his face. Nothing more. He merely scowled. All the women stopped laughing. The show was over. They went back to work.

Now we were in the room where the cans were labeled. The crew was made up of Mexican and Filipino boys. They fed the machines from flat conveyor lines. Twenty or more of them, my age and more, all of them pausing to see who I was and realizing that a new man was about to go to work.

"You stand and watch," Shorty said. "Pitch in when you see how they do it."

"It looks very simple," I said. "I'm ready right now."

"No. Wait a few minutes."

And he left.

I stood watching. This was very simple. But my stomach would have nothing to do with it. In a moment I was letting go again. Again the laughter. But these boys weren't like the women. They really thought it was funny to see Arturo Bandini having such a time of it.

That first morning had no beginning and no end. Between vomitings I stood at the can dump and convulsed. And I told them who I was. Arturo Bandini, the writer. Haven't you heard of me? You will! Don't worry. You will! My book on California fisheries. It is going to be the standard work on the subject. I spoke fast, between vomitings.

"I'm not here permanently. I'm gathering material for a book on California fisheries. I'm Bandini, the writer. This isn't essential, this job. I may give my wages to charity: the Salvation Army."

And I heaved again. Now there was nothing in my stomach except that which never came out. I bent over and choked, a famous writer with my arms around my waist, squirming and choking. But nothing would come. Somebody stopped laughing long enough to yell that I should drink water. Hey writer! Dreenk water! So I found a hydrant and drank water. It came out in a stream while I raced for the door. And they laughed. Oh that writer! What a writer he was! See him write!

"You get over it," they laughed.

"Go home," they said. "Go write book. You writer. You too good for feesh cannery. Go home and write book about puke."

Shrieks of laughter.

I walked outside and stretched out on a pile of fish nets hot in the sun between two buildings away from the main road that skirted the channel. Over the hum from the machinery I could hear them laughing. I didn't care, not at all. I felt like sleeping. But the fish nets were bad, rich with the smell of mackerel and salt. In a moment the flies discovered me. That made it worse. Soon all the flies in Los Angeles Harbor had got news of me. I crawled off the nets to a patch of sand. It was wonderful. I stretched my arms and let my fingers find cool spots in the sand. Nothing ever felt so good. Even little particles of sand my breath blew were sweet in my nose and mouth. A tiny sandbug stopped on a hill to investigate the commotion. Ordinarily I would have killed him without hesitating. He looked into my eyes, paused, and came forward. He began to climb my chin.

"Go ahead," I said. "I don't mind. You can go into my mouth if you want to."

He passed my chin and I felt him tickle my lips. I had to look at him cross-eyed to see him.

"Come ahead," I said. "I'm not going to hurt you. This is a holiday."

He climbed toward my nostrils. Then I went to sleep.

A whistle woke me up. It was twelve o'clock, noon. The workers filed out of the buildings, Mexicans, Filipinos, and Japanese. The Japanese were too busy to look anywhere other than straight ahead. They hurried by. But the Mexicans and Filipinos saw me stretched out, and they laughed again, for there he was, that great writer, all flattened out like a drunkard.

It had got all over the cannery by this time that a great personality was in their midst, none other than that immortal Arturo Bandini, the writer, and there he lay, no doubt composing something for the ages, this great writer who made fish his specialty, who worked for a mere twenty-five cents an hour because he was so democratic, that great writer. So great he was indeed, that - well, there he sprawled, flat on his belly in the sun, puking his guts out, too sick to stand the smell he was going to write a book about. A book on California fisheries! Oh, what a writer! A book on California puke! Oh, what a writer he is!

Laughter.

Thirty minutes passed. The whistle blew again. They streamed back from the lunch counters. I rolled over and saw them pass, blurred in shape, a bilious dream. The bright sun was sickening. I buried my face in my arm. They were still enjoying it, but not so much as before, because the great writer was beginning to bore them. Lifting my head I saw them out of sticky eyes as the stream moved by. They were munching apples, licking ice-cream bars, eating chocolate-covered candy from noisy packages. The nausea returned. My stomach grumbled, kicked, rebelled.

Hey writer! Hey writer! Hey writer!

I heard them gather around me, the laughter and the cackling. Hey writer! The voices were shattered echoes. The dust from their feet rolled in lazy clouds. Then louder than ever a mouth against my ear, and a shout. Heeey writer! Arms grabbed me, lifted me up and turned me over. Before it happened I knew what they were going to do. This was their idea of a really funny episode. They were going to stick a fish down my waist. I knew it without even seeing the fish. I lay on my back. The mid-day sun smeared my face. I felt fingers at my shirt and the rip of cloth. Of course! Just as I thought! They were going to stick that fish down my waist. But I never even saw the fish. I kept my eyes closed. Then something cold and clammy pressed my chest and was pushed down to my belt: that fish! The fools. I knew it a long time before they did it. I just knew they were going to do that. But I didn't feel like caring. One fish more or less didn't matter now.

Chapter Ten

TIME PASSED. MAYBE a half hour. I reached into my shirt and felt the fish against my skin. I ran my fingers along the surface, feeling his fins and tail. Now I felt better. I pulled the fish out, held him up, and looked at him. A mackerel, a foot long. I held my breath so I would not smell him. Then I put him in my mouth and bit off his head. I was sorry he was already dead. I threw him aside and got to my feet. There were some big flies making a feast of my face and the wet spot on my shirt where the fish had lain. A bold fly landed on my arm and stubbornly refused to move, even though I warned him by shaking my arm. This made me insanely angry with him. I slapped him, killing him on my arm. But I was still so furious with him that I put him in my mouth and chewed him to bits and spat him out. Then I got the fish again, placed him on a level spot in the sand, and jumped on him until he burst open. The whiteness of my face was a thing I could feel, like plaster. Every time I moved a hundred flies dispersed. The flies were such idiotic fools. I stood still, killing them, but even the dead among them taught the living nothing. They still insisted on annoying me. For some time I stood patiently and quietly, scarcely breathing, watching the flies move into a position where I could kill them.

The nausea was past. I had forgotten that part of it. What I hated was the laughter, the flies, and the dead fish. Again I wished that fish had been alive. He would have been taught a lesson not soon forgotten. I didn't know what would happen next. I would get even with them. Bandini never forgets. He will find a way. You shall pay for this — all of you.

Just across the way was the lavatory. I started for it. Two impudent flies followed me. I stopped dead in my tracks, fuming, still as a statue, waiting for the flies to land. At last I got one of them. The other escaped. I pulled off the fly's wings and dropped him to the ground. He crawled about in the dirt, darting like a fish, thinking he would escape me in that fashion. It was preposterous. For a while I let him do so to his heart's desire. Then I jumped on him with both feet and crushed him into the ground. I built a mound over the spot, and spat upon it.

In the lavatory I swayed back and forth like a rocking chair, standing and wondering what to do next, trying to get hold of myself. There were too many cannery workers for a fight. I had already settled with the flies and the dead fish, but not the cannery workers. You couldn't kill cannery workers the way you killed flies. It had to be something else, some way of fighting without fists. I washed my face in cold water and thought about it.

In walked a dark Filipino. He was one of the boys from the labeling crew. He stood at the trough along the wall, fighting buttons impatiently and frowning. Then he solved the buttons and was relieved, smiling all the time and shivering a bit for ease. Now he felt a lot better. I leaned over the sink at the opposite wall and let the water run through my hair and over my neck. The Filipino turned around and began again with the buttons. He lit a cigarette and stood against the wall watching me. He did it on purpose, watching me in such a way that I would know he was watching me and nothing else. But I wasn't afraid of him. I was never afraid of him. Nobody in California was ever afraid of a Filipino. He smiled to let me know he didn't think much of me either, or of my weak stomach. I straightened up and let the water drip from my face. It fell to my dusty shoes, making bright dots on them. The Filipino thought less and less of me. Now he was no longer smiling but sneering.

"How you feel?" he said.

"What business is it of yours?"

He was slender and over medium height. I wasn't as large as he, but I was perhaps as heavy. I leered at him from head to foot. I even stuck out my chin and pulled back my lower lip to denote the zenith of contempt. He leered back, but in a different way, not with his chin out. He was not in the least afraid of me. If something didn't happen to interrupt it, his courage would soon be so great that he would insult me.

His skin was a nut brown. I noticed it because his teeth were so white. They were brilliant teeth, like a row of pearls. When I saw how dark he was I suddenly knew what to say to him. I could say it to all of them. It would hurt them every time. I knew because a thing like that had hurt me. In grade school the kids used to hurt me by calling me Wop and Dago. It had hurt every time. It was a miserable feeling. It used to make me feel so pitiful, so unworthy. And I knew it would hurt the Filipino too. It was so easy to do that all at once I was laughing quietly at him, and over me came a cool, confident feeling, at ease with everything. I couldn't fail. I walked close to him and put my face near his, smiling the way he smiled. He could tell something was coming. Immediately his expression changed. He was waiting for it - whatever it was.

"Give me a cigarette," I said. "You nigger."

That hit him. Ah, but he felt that baby. Instantly there was a change, a shift of feelings, the movement from offense to defense. The smile hardened on his face and his face was frozen: he wanted to keep smiling but he couldn't. Now he hated me. His eyes sharpened. It was a wonderful feeling. He couldn't escape his own squirming. It was open to the whole world. It had been that way with me too. Once in a drug store a girl had called me Dago. I was only ten years old, but all at once I hated that girl the way the Filipino hated me. I had offered to buy the girl an ice-cream cone. She wouldn't take it, saying, my mother told me not to have anything to do with you because you're a Dago. I decided I would do it to the Filipino again. "You're not a nigger at all," I said. "You're a damn Filipino, which is worse."

But now his face was neither brown nor black. It was purple.

"A yellow Filipino. A damn oriental foreigner! Doesn't it make you uncomfortable to be around white people?"

He didn't want to talk about it. He shook his head quickly in denial.

"Christ," I said. "Look at your face! You're as yellow as a canary."

And I laughed. I bent over and shrieked. I pointed my finger at his face and shrieked until I could no longer pretend that the laughter was genuine. His face was tight as ice with pain and humiliation, his mouth lodged in helplessness, like a mouth stuck on a stick, uncertain and aching.

"Boy!" I said. "You came close to fooling me. All the time I thought you were a nigger. And here you turn out to be yellow."

Then he softened. His cloggy face loosened. He made a weak smile of jelly and water. Colors moved across his face. He looked down at his shirt front and brushed away a streak of cigarette ash. Then he raised his eyes. "You feel better now?" he asked.

I said, "What do you care? You're a Filipino. You Filipinos don't get sick because you're used to this slop. I'm a writer, man! An American writer, man! Not a Filipino writer. I wasn't born in the Philippine Islands. I was born right here in the good old U.S.A. under the stars and stripes."

Shrugging, he couldn't make much sense out of what I said. "Me no writer," he smiled. "No no no. I born in Honolulu."

"That's just it!" I said. "That's the difference. I write books, man! What do you Orientals expect? I write books in the mother tongue, the English language. I'm no slimy Oriental."

For the third time he said, "You feel better now?"

"What do you expect!" I said. "I write books, you fool! Tomes! I wasn't born in Honolulu. I was born right here in good old Southern California."

He flipped his cigarette across the room to the trough. It hit the wall with sparks flying and then landed not in the trough but on the floor.

"I go now," he said. "You come pretty soon, no?"

"Give me a cigarette."

"No got none."

He moved toward the door.

"No more. Last one."

But there was a pack bulging from his shirt pocket.

"You yellow Filipino liar," I said. "What're those?"

He grinned and took out the package, offering me one. They were a cheaper brand, a ten cent cigarette. I pushed them away.

"Filipino cigarettes. No thanks. Not for me."

That was all right with him.

"I see you later," he said.

"Not if I see you first."

He went away. I heard his feet moving away on the gravel path. I was alone. His discarded cigarette butt lay on the floor. I tore away the wet and smoked it to my fingertips. When I could no longer hold it I dropped it to the floor and crushed it with my heel. That for you! And I ground it to a brown spot. It had had a different taste than ordinary cigarettes; somehow it tasted more like a Filipino than like tobacco.