Fantesia: A Play In Three Acts (Of Salvation), by Tom Dinard

I.

He walks into the Los Angeles Public Library. It’s a bustling weekday afternoon downtown, and he’s once again lost among the masses, another ant in stained cloth and worn leather. He’s searching for a book and things other than books — a job, a meal, a constant companion, the next tavern to dull his yearning for a few hours, some greater meaning to all the monotony. Today he can do with just a book.

He scours the shelves. The spines with the most vibrant colors are the dullest inside. He doesn’t find God in Religion but gets a fleeting kick out of the Germans in Philosophy. He decides Math can’t be right if all it relies on is logic, and the crags and summits of Geology are too rocky to navigate. Surgery cuts to his core for a few hours, the precision of the pictures and word structures sharpening his scholarly scalpel. But that, too, ends up being cosmetic and not permanent, and his wanderlust for words leads him to the inevitable: the novels.

“… I pulled a book down and opened it, and there it was,” he writes years later. “I stood for a moment, reading. Then like a man who had found gold in the city dump, I carried the book to a table. The lines rolled easily across the page, there was a flow. Each line had its own energy and was followed by another like it. The very substance of each line gave the page a form, a feeling of something carved into it. And here, at last, was a man who was not afraid of emotion. The humour and the pain were intermixed with a superb simplicity. The beginning of that book was a wild and enormous miracle to me.”

He reads Ask the Dust over and over and inhales everything else by its author, John Fante, and he dedicates his life to becoming his heir. His writing life is a hard one — one of booze, transience and misery, but he writes, and he calls Fante his “god,” and he becomes famous. His books are made into movies. His prose is revered and reviled and respected. He comes to meet Fante, and he is honored to write the preface to a later edition of Ask the Dust once he has made his hero famous, too. He ends his tribute with the line, “That’s enough. Now this book is yours.”

II.

I wander away from the keg crowd at the fraternity mixer. I’m not big on drinking to begin with, and tonight the stale Meister Brau I did ingest is burning in my gut and dooming me to a night on the toilet. I’ll need a book, I think, as I walk past the still-bustling main drag of bars, ice cream shops, record stores and college souvenirs.

It’s a warm February night in the desert, and I know I’m different from the rest of these people I’m walking past. I don’t care about an “undergrauate education” and only pull off decent grades because my major is Creative Writing and I can stitch a good-enough yarn together in a few hours. But I’d rather do my learning while getting lost on the highway to an old mining town, paying attention to Gilmour’s right hand on “Dogs,” or making sure to stay silent on a Salvation Army wool sofa in the back corner of a dark stucco apartment complex, buying a five-pounds brick of diesel weed from a guy named Chuy for two grand so I can FedEx it back to my Cornell buddies for five.

The used bookstore on the side street that I found as a freshman and was sure would be closed by the time I was a sophomore is somehow still open for me tonight as a senior, and I enter and try to ignore the smell of the calicos scurrying up the carpeted kitty tree and I know I need to lose myself in fiction tonight because I can’t handle anything but reality. My lifelong plague of bowel upheaval while perusing books flares up with bad-beer-enhanced intensity, and I increase the speed of my slide by the stacks in kind, going from A to C in seconds and finding myself staring blankly at what I don’t want: Faulkner. Not tonight, anyway.

I look to the left and on the thin, cream colored spine is engraved basic type. It reads: John Fante. Dreams From Bunker Hill. Black Sparrow Press.

I open the book and begin reading the first page. It’s about a young man, twenty-one years old, setting off on his own in a strange city in 1934, struggling with money while waiting tables (“one dollar a day plus meals”) and not yet knowing but wanting, dreaming, of only one thing, and getting his first taste of success in this grandiose endeavor.

“Indeed, my first literary efforts were letters to him, asking his advice, sending him suggestions for stories I might write, and finally sending him stories too, many stories, a story a week, until even Heinrich Muller, curmudgeon of the literary world, the tiger in his lair, seemed to give up the struggle and condescended to drop me a letter with two lines in it, and then a second letter with four lines, and finally a two-page letter of twenty-four lines and then, wonder of wonders, a check for $150, payment in full for my first acceptance.”

By the time I’ve finished that paragraph, I’m walking back to my apartment with the book in my hands. I laugh out loud at myself as I walk straight into a telephone pole. I don’t stop reading until I finish the book, long after I’ve relieved myself.

I still haven’t stopped.

III.

You’re a thirty-five-year-old content manager at a public relations firm in Microsoft, U.S.A., that’s proud of its “culture.” You fooled around in newspapers, trying to write your way out of your day gig of page design, but the editor never gave you a chance for stories because you were “simply too good at designing pages.”

You married, you had three kids, you bought a golden retriever and a three-thousand-two-hundred-and-twenty-square-foot rambler in Bellevue that your wife posts photos of on Facebook and calls your “home,” and you go along with all of it because you’re driving a 735i and you can get away a few nights a month, stealing across the floating bridge into the city, doing bat hits while listening to Stern replays on Sirius, and pondering the opening sentences of the novel you’ve told friends has been “in utero” for the last five years.

One night you and your wife are on a date night in a strip mall near your house and you finish your Cold Stone Creamery cup and Barnes and Noble is lit up and your wife wants The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest and you’re looking at the novels and you see a hot-pink-and-yellow-and-green oddity jumping out at you off the shelf between Annie Dillard and Isak Dinesen. It’s called Contemplating Your Navel, which seems stupid, it’s by a writer you’ve never heard of, and you’re not sure why you’re looking at it, although you often pick up contemporary, sexy-looking titles just like this on trips to the bookstore and think to yourself, “Why can’t I do that?” You open the belly-button book and look at the dedication page, and it reads, “For John Fante: The man who made me a writer.”

As the cashier puts Contemplating Your Navel in the bag and is about to do the same with Wait Until Spring, Bandini , you point to the cover of Bandini and ask, “So, have you heard of this guy Fante?”

The man, who wears the long, graying beard, ever-so-slight paunch and inch-thick glasses of someone who knows his books, smiles.

“Of course,” he says, handing it back to you. “Fine choice.”

***

Contemplate Tom Dinard’s navel right here:

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