1933 Was A Bad Year
John Fante
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
About the Author
Other Books by John Fante
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter One
It was a bad one, the Winter of 1933. Wading home that night through flames of snow, my toes burning, my ears on fire, the snow swirling around me like a flock of angry nuns, I stopped dead in my tracks. The time had come to take stock. Fair weather or foul, certain forces in the world were at work trying to destroy me.
Dominic Molise, I said, hold it. Is everything going according to plan? Examine your condition with care, take an impartial survey of your situation. What goes on here, Dom?
There I was in Roper, Colorado, growing older by the minute. In six months I would be eighteen and graduated from high school. I was sixty-four inches tall and had not grown one centimeter in three years. I was bowlegged and pigeontoed and my ears protruded like Pinocchio’s. My teeth were crooked, and my face was as freckled as a bird’s egg.
I was the son of a bricklayer who had not worked in five months. I didn’t own an overcoat, I wore three sweaters, and my mother had already begun a series of novenas for the new suit I needed to graduate in June.
Lord, I said, for in those days I was a believer who spoke frankly to his God: Lord, what gives? Is this what you want? Is this why you put me on the earth? I didn’t ask to be born. I had absolutely nothing to do with it, except that I’m here, asking fair questions, the reasons why, so tell me, give me a sign: is this my reward for trying to be a good Christian, for twelve years of Catholic doctrine and four years of Latin? Have I ever doubted the Transubstantiation, or the Holy Trinity, or the Resurrection? How many masses have I missed on Sundays and holy days of obligation? Lord, you can count them on your fingers.
Are you playing a game with me? Have things gotten out of hand? Have you lost control? Is Lucifer back in power? Be honest with me, for I’m troubled all the time. Give me a clue. Is life worth while? Will everything turn out right?
We lived on Arapahoe Street, at the foot of the first hills that rose to become the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains. They shot up like jagged skyscrapers, staring down at our town, a haze of blue and green in summer, sugar white in winter, with peaked turrets shrouded in the clouds. Every winter someone was lost up there, trapped in a canyon or buried in a snowslide. In spring the melting snows turned Roper Creek into a wild river that swept away fences and bridges and flooded the streets, piling mud along Pearl Street and inundating the courthouse basement. Cold country, bad-tempered country, the earth’s crust a sheet of ice through April, snow on Easter Sunday, sometimes a sudden snowstorm in May: bad country for a ballplayer, specially for a pitcher who hadn’t thrown a ball since October.
But The Arm kept me going, that sweet left arm, the one nearest my heart. The snow couldn’t hurt it and the wind couldn’t pierce it because I kept it soaked with Sloan’s Liniment, a little bottle of it in my pocket at all times, I reeked with it, sometimes sent out of class to wash the pine tartness away, but I walked out proudly without shame, conscious of my destiny, steeled against the sneers of the boys and the tilted nostrils of the girls.
I had a great stride in those days, the gait of a gunslinger, the looseness of the classic lefthander, the left shoulder drooping a little, The Arm dangling limp as a serpent—my arm, my blessed, holy arm that came from God, and if The Lord created me out of a poor bricklayer he hung me with jewels when he hinged that whizzer to my collarbone.
Let it snow then! And let the winters be long and cold with spring a time to dream about, for this was not the end of Dominic Molise after all, only his beginning, and the warm summer sun would find him doing the work of God with his cunning left arm. This snow-swept Arapahoe Street was a place of distinction, a landmark where once he walked on despairing nights, his birthplace, to be so inscribed in the Hall of Fame. A plaque, if you please, a bronze plaque set in concrete on a monument at the corner of Ninth and Arapahoe Streets: Boyhood Neighborhood of Dominic Molise, World’s Greatest Southpaw.
God had answered my questions, cleared my doubts, restored my faith, and the world was right again. The wind vanished and the snow drifted down like hushed confetti. Grandma Bettina used to say that snowflakes were the souls in heaven returning to Earth for brief visits. I knew this was not true but it was possible, and 1 believed it sometimes when the whim amused me.
I held out my hand and many flakes fell upon it, alive and star-shaped for a few seconds, and who could say? Perhaps the soul of Grandpa Giovanni, dead seven years now, and Joe Hardt, our third baseman, killed last summer on his motorcycle, and all of my father’s people in the faraway mountains of Abruzzi, great-aunts and uncles I had never known, all vanished from the earth. And the others, the billions who lived a while and went away, the poor soldiers killed in battle, the sailors lost at sea, the victims of plague and earthquake, the rich and the poor, the dead from the beginning of time, none escaping except Jesus Christ, the only one in all the history of man who ever came back, but no one else, and did I believe that?
I had to believe it. Where did my slider come from, and my knuckle-ball, and where did I get all that control? If I stopped believing I might come apart, lose my rhythm, start walking batters. Hell yes, there were doubts, but I pushed them back. The life of a pitcher was tough enough without losing faith in his God. One flash of doubt might bring a crimp in The Arm, so why muddy the water? Leave things alone. The Arm came from heaven. Believe that. Never mind predestination, and if God is all good how come so much evil, and if he knows everything how come he created people and sent them to hell? Plenty of time for that. Get into the minors, move up to the big time, pitch in the World Series, make the Hall of Fame. Then sit back and ask questions, ask what does God look like, and why are babies born crippled, and who made hunger and death.
Through the whispering snow I saw dimly the small houses along Arapahoe. I knew everyone in every house, every cat and dog in the neighborhood. In truth I knew almost everyone of Roper’s ten thousand people, and some day they would all be dead. That too was the fate of everyone in the house at the end of the street, the frame house with the sagging front porch, paint-blistered, with the slanting peaked roof, home of bricklayer Peter Molise, where the only brick were in the chimney, and even that was crumbling.
But when it was time to die the condition of your house didn’t matter, and all of us would have to go—Grandma Bettina next, then Papa, then Mama, then myself since I was the oldest, then my brother August, two years younger, then my sister Clara, and finally my little brother Frederick. Somewhere along the way our dog Rex would crawl off and die too.
Why was I thinking these things and making a graveyard of the world? Was I losing my faith after all? Could it be because I was poor? Impossible. All great ballplayers came from poor folks. Who ever heard of a rich rookie becoming a Ty Cobb or a Babe Ruth! Was it a girl? There were no girls in my life, except Dorothy Parrish, who hardly knew I existed, a mere gnat in her life.
Oh, God, help me! And I walked faster, my thoughts pursuing me, and I began to run, my frozen shoes squealing like mice, but running didn’t help, the thoughts to the left and right and behind me. But as I ran, The Arm, that good left arm, took hold of the situation and spoke soothingly: ease up, Kid, it’s loneliness, you’re all alone in the world; your father, your mother, your faith, they can’t help you, nobody helps anybody, you only help yourself, and that’s why I’m here, because we are inseparable, and we’ll take care of everything.
Oh, Arm! Strong and faithful ar
m, talk sweetly to me now. Tell me of my future, the crowds cheering, the pitch sliding across at the knees, the batters coming up and going down, fame and fortune and victory, we shall have it all. And one day we shall die and lie side by side in a grave, Dom Molise and his beautiful arm, the sports world shocked, in mourning, the telegram to my family from the President of the United States, the flags at half-mast at every ball park in the nation, fans weeping unashamed, Damon Runyon’s four-part biography in the Saturday Evening Post: Triumph over Adversity, the Life of Dominic Molise.
Under an elm tree I stopped to cry, the bitterness of my approaching death too much to bear; one so young, so talented, cut down in the prime of his life. Oh God, be merciful: don’t take me too fast! Spare me a few years, look kindly upon my youth. By nineteen I shall be ready for the big time. Give me those years and ten more, a total of twelve, no more and no less, I don’t care if it’s with the Phillies or the Cubs, only give me those years and you can strike me down at twenty-nine, which is plenty of time, my sweet Lord, figuring thirty games a year, that’s three hundred and sixty games, a lot of baseball, a lot of pitches to emblazon the name of Dom Molise among the immortals.
The house was in darkness, the front windows staring blind-eyed. The clean untrod snow upon the path meant Papa was still down at the Onyx, shooting pool.
I kicked the snow from my shoes and stepped into the front room where Clara slept on the sofa and Frederick on an army cot. It was a crowded house. The only one with a private bedroom was Grandma Bettina, and hers was hardly a bedroom, a tiny place with a slanting roof off the kitchen, where the bed took up all the space and left no room for even a chair.
I turned on the kitchen light, put a match to the oven in the gas stove, and got out my homework—history, a paragraph of Virgil to translate, and the writing of a short essay on the mystical body of Christ. It was one of those easier nights when Sister Mary Delphine, wearying of pouring it on, gave us a breather.
Even so, it took an hour to translate six lines of Latin, and at midnight I started the essay on the mystical body of Christ.
“What is the mystical body of Christ?” I began. “A good question, an important question, so important that, if we know nothing else, it is sufficient to sustain us to the very gates of Heaven. And since it is so important, then we must put our full attention to it. All important dogma deserves our deepest reflection. Too often we forget this, and many a sinner in his final hours before the last judgement stands regretful before God Almighty, trembling in fear and regret for having neglected the truths of his faith. If we would but study the dogma of our blessed church as much as we waste time reading trashy books and seeing obscene motion pictures in order to consider the mystical body of Christ, then our salvation would be assured. Time is short and the hour cometh. Our Lord asks very little of his creatures. He has provided us with unselfish teachers, the blessed nuns of the Order of St. Catherine, and too often we fail to realize what a golden opportunity is given us to take advantage of their wisdom and advise. So let us heed the sacred counsel of our beloved sisters and think carefully of the meaning of the mystical body of Christ. The sins of the world are many, alas, but no sinner is greater than he who neglects the study of our holy faith, and when we are called to account some day for the offenses in this life, let us hope that we will not be charged with turning our eyes from the sacred truths of God’s holy church.”
Bull’s eye.
The essay would bring an A plus. No matter if it didn’t explain the mystical body of Christ, no matter if it was laced with nonsense, all the beguiling phrases were there, irresistible to Sister Mary Delphine: “regretful before Almighty God—trembling in fear—trashy books—obscene motion pictures—the blessed nuns of the Order of St. Catherine—the sacred truths of God’s holy church.” Delphine would cream in her pants.
I was studying history when the squeal of bedsprings seeped from Bettina’s room. Grandma Bettina, deadly enemy of the light company, came to the kitchen door in her flannel nightgown. She was a small fierce old lady with hands so fleshless they seemed like claws clasped upon the small mound of her tummy. Her hair was white as linen, the skin at her temples so pale and transparent you could almost see inside her head. She spoke only Italian and pretended not to understand English whenever the subject matter displeased her.
For ten seconds she just stood there, nodding at me with a despondent smile.
“There he sits,” she kept nodding. “The brilliant young American, the product of an American womb, the pride of his dim-witted mother, the hope of the coming generation, there he sits, burning electricity.”
“Grandma, I’m trying to study.”
“And what are you studying, O wise and clever grandson? Is it a book about hunger and men walking the streets seeking work? Is it a book telling of your father without a job for seven months, or is it the rich promise of golden America, land of equality and brotherhood, beautiful America, stinking like a plague?”
“We’re having a depression,” I told her. “Besides, it’s winter. Papa can’t lay brick in this weather.”
She clasped her hands in front of her.
“How clever are the young Americans!” she breathed, rocking her hands. “The generation with all the answers!”
I groaned.
She sniffed the air, the Sloan’s liniment.
“As always, you smell like a pestilence.”
“It’s a clean smell.”
“The smell of a sick country. Hear my words: one day this stench will cover all the land.”
She was launched.
“Who do you deceive with those foolish books?” she wanted to know, a lawyer showing off in court. “Better that you should fall on your knees and pray for mercy!” Her mouth was at my ear, her nose in my hair as she whispered a leering question: “Have you been to confession lately? Any boy of seventeen should go at least twice a day.”
That did it.
“Old woman, drop dead!”
“Ha!” she barked. ‘Young America speaks, showing its respect for the aged! At last I come to my reward for bringing your father into the world! For this I traveled five thousand miles in steerage to a barbarian land!” The insults came like buckshot: I was a jackal, a rat, a snake, a monster out of the belly of my mother. I was deformed, an elbow grew out of the back of my head, my nose was at my navel, my eyes were in my ass. My mother was a donkey, a cow, a pig, a chicken, a she-goat. Her people were cowards, thieves, whores, lunatics who would finish their days in an insane asylum. As for me, I would end up with a rope around my neck at a public hanging, alongside my two brothers. America would go down in flames, set afire by exploding light companies.
Swift as an old cat she crossed to the naked light bulb over the table and snapped it off, then swished away to her room and slammed the door. I turned on the light and heard her in there, crying out to God.
“Release me from this bondage. Put me in a box and send me back to Torricella Peligna!”
I knew her troubled soul, and I pitied her. She was lonely, her roots dangling in an alien land. She had not wanted to come to America, but my grandfather had given her no other choice. There had been poverty in Abruzzi too, but it was a sweeter poverty that everyone shared like bread passed around. Death was shared too, and grief, and good times, and the village of Torricella Peligna was like a single human being. My grandmother was a finger torn from the rest of the body and nothing in the new life could assuage her desolation. She was like all those others who had come from her part of Italy. Some were better off, and some were wealthy, but the joy was gone from their lives, and the new country was a lonely place where “O Sole Mio” and “Come Back to Sorrento” were heartbreak songs.
Bettina’s cries now brought my mother from her bedroom, her thick brown hair hanging to her waist, her hands clutching her nightgown. Her eyes were enormous and green and always astonished. She was born in Chicago, but she was of Italian stock and really a peasant like Grandma, the mark of loneliness upo
n her too, inexpressibly alien, not Italian and far less American, a fragile misfit. Her people were from Potenza, a town above Naples, a place reputed to be full of redheads.
In Grandma Bettina’s opinion, the Potenzese, next to Americans, were the most ridiculous people in the world. Not that Grandma had ever been to Potenza and seen it with her own eyes, but all her life she had heard wild stories about the Potenzese.
Since the Abruzzese had need of a place they considered beneath their own, they settled on Potenza in the manner that the Calabrese despised the Sicilians, and the Neapolitans scorned everything south of Naples, and the Romans tilted their noses at the Neapolitans, and the Florentines shrugged off the Romans. To the Abruzzese, the people of Potenza were some kind of a national joke, as if they lived in tilted houses and were all dwarfs. Just mentioning Potenza always brought a condescending smirk from my father. He had married the daughter of the Potenzese, God help him, but he was always ready to smile patiently at this ironic turn of events, and only too glad to forgive his wife for her parents.
Listening at Bettina’s door to the last of the old woman’s laments, Mama clicked her tongue patiently, for the Potenzese looked down on the Abruzzese too.
“She means well, the poor old thing. She’s had such a hard life…all those people.”
“What people?”
“From Abruzzi. No wonder they’re rough and bad-tempered. It’s nothing but rocks and a few goats and no electric lights. Like Calabria and Sicily and all those poor places.”
She had never been there, had never been anywhere except a Chicago tenement.
“How do you know?”
“Everybody knows. You can tell by the way they act, yelling, swearing, fighting. It’s in their blood. Look at your father.”
She moved closer, smelling of sleep, a fragrant mustiness, talcum powder and soap and the top drawer of her dresser with the sachet bags. Sometimes when I could not sleep I went into her bedroom and exchanged pillows with her and the fragrance worked like a drug. She was so much older than her forty years. It was hard to think that she had ever been young. There was a photograph of her at ten, sitting in a swing at a Chicago playground, and she looked forty there too, a little girl of forty with pig-tails and white shoes.