Chapter Twenty-seven
A Good Novel Can Change the World

It was fall and beginning to turn cold on the New York streets. I returned to Malibu for a ten-day stay. I had a pocketful of tax-free money from my street peddling business and my bills were paid. I had upgraded my room to a much larger one on the same floor. The rent was seventy-five dollars a week but it was worth it. Most nights I drank at Tweed’s Bar on Seventy-second Street, around the corner near West End Avenue.

On the plane ride west, I’d gotten drunk and made some trouble for myself by making a stupid remark about hijackers. I was threatened with arrest and detained upon exiting the plane.

My snarling brother Nick, visiting from Northern California, picked me up at baggage claim after my long delay with security. Then, on our way to Malibu, he filled me in on our father’s condition. The old man now had lesions on his legs and feet that would not heal. He was soaking them in tubs of Epsom salts every afternoon, but the condition persisted. The only remaining residents of the big house on Cliffside Drive were my brother Jim and my mother and father. My sister Vickie now lived in Santa Monica with her husband and two sons.

John Fante had returned to writing fiction and he seemed more at peace, despite his worsening diabetes. This was a different man than had raised me.

I’d gotten pretty good at cooking pasta for myself, and for dinner, at my mother’s urging, I cooked linguini with clam sauce, al dente. The old man loved it. The recipe had been given to me by a guy from Little Italy who tended bar on the West Side.

My father, my brothers, and I drank Cribari rosé wine and got along well. After the meal in the big living room, my father and I sat watching 60 Minutes, his favorite TV show. The old man admired Mike Wallace’s annoying and aggressive style.

As we watched the program, our conversation turned to my writing and my life on the East Coast. I related the story of my radio show failure and the time I had spent writing and directing the production each week.

“Why the hell did you give it up?” Pop asked.

“They tried to screw me. They offered me next to nothing to syndicate. I got pissed off.”

“The imperative in a situation like that is as follows: See the big picture, do not lose your cool. Let go of the bitterness. You can learn from the mistake.”

“It was definitely uncool.”

“Listen, I saw one of the radio scripts, Dan. It wasn’t that bad.”

“You’re the author, Pop. I got lucky with a flimflam radio show. I saw my chance and I took it. That doesn’t make me a writer. Anyway, now I’m making decent money at my peddling gig.”

“A gig? Pardon me, but what the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“A job. A business.”

“Speak English for chrissake.”

“Right.”

“Look, I’ve said it before, give it time, kid. A man has to mature—to discover himself. I wish to Christ I’d started later—that I hadn’t derailed my life at the studios.”

“You made a damn decent living.”

“The point is not to quit on yourself. If it’s there, you’ll find it. All I’m saying is give it time, capisce?”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Don’t patronize me, for chrissake. I’m trying to help you. I don’t appreciate being spoken to like one of your exalted street-merchant companions.”

“Sure, Pop. I’ll think it over.”

The next day we were eating my mom’s hamburgers in the living room as the World Series was about to get under way. Vin Scully would do the play-by-play for NBC as the Dodgers battled the American League champs, the Oakland A’s.

Before the game, the host, Joe Garagiola, was interviewing a player. Garagiola was a veteran television baseball announcer who had once been a journeyman catcher with a mediocre lifetime batting average. John Fante became pissed off every time Garagiola’s face appeared on a TV screen. He considered the guy to be a poor example for Italian-Americans. For Pop, Garagiola’s ex-jock, man-on-the-street style and repeated inane remarks insulted the Italian people. My father instantly became angry when Garagiola, who grew up on the same street as the Yankee great Yogi Berra, made reference to their friendship. Berra, according to John Fante, was a credit to the Italian people. Garagiola was a grinning goombah moron. Pop had nicknamed the guy Joe-the-Garage.

During a commercial my father glared toward the kitchen where my mother was cooking. “Honey,” he snarled, “bring me the phone!”

“What’s up, Pop?” I said. “Can’t it wait? The game is coming on.”

“Mind your own business, kid. I’ve got something to do.”

A minute later Mom carried the phone with its long cord into the living room and my father dialed Western Union. After connecting with the operator and giving the address where he wanted the message to go as the World Series NBC broadcast booth, John Fante dictated the following telegram to Garagiola: “Do your good deed for the day, Joe. Shut up!”

The Dodgers won that day.

Later that week at breakfast, Pop hobbled to the table with some typed pages in his hand—a manuscript he had been working on. The completed novel would later be titled The Brotherhood of the Grape and would mark his comeback as a published author.

Slapping the pages down on the table, he lit a cigarette, then sipped his coffee. “Here it is, kid.”

“So you’re working on a new novel?”

He smiled. “Can’t get anything past you, can I?”

“You want me to read it?”

“You mean as opposed to wiping your ass with it? Yes, that would be my intent in showing it to you.”

I lifted the inch of typed pages and held it up. “What’s it called?”

“The Last Supper, I think. That’s what I’m calling it now. It’s about the death of my father. Your grandfather. It’s set upstate in the Sacramento Valley.”

“I’ll have a look at it.”

“Read it now—before you start getting drunk for the day.”

“I’ve got some stuff to do in Santa Monica. I’m meeting a guy.”

John Fante snatched the pages off the table. “No problem. I know you’re a busy man with pressing obligations. Fuck it.”

“Okay. I’ll read it now.”

“Your forbearance is humbly appreciated.”

“Okay, okay.”

After breakfast, which began with another father-and-son exchange, this time over what my mother would cook that morning—eggs with hash browns or scrambled eggs with bacon—I took my father’s pages out onto the back patio. The rear of the house faced a quarter-acre mowed lawn that ended near a line of huge fern trees. Behind the trees was the six-foot-high cinder-block wall. The Fante fortress.

I am not a fast reader, so it took me almost two hours to complete my reading. It was John Fante at his best: irony, bittersweet humor, and fast-reading, lean prose.

I was thirty years old at the time, an avid reader of modern fiction—guys like J. P. Donleavy and Edward Lewis Wallant. I was also a radical political nutjob. At the time I could easily plug myself into a five-minute harangue on the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon and Robert McNamara and that evil Machiavellian asshole Henry Kissinger. So, in fairness to my own stupidity, what I read was filtered through the screen of that mind-set.

It was late morning when I was done. A perfect fall Malibu sky. I’d sneaked two tall glasses of rosé wine and smoked half a pack of Luckies while I sat in the sunshine.

I brought the pages into the dining room where my father was snarling to himself about a story he’d just read in The New Yorker. I held his manuscript out to him.

After he looked up he flung the magazine to the floor. “They call that pompous shit fiction? Geezus! What is it, kid?”

“I just finished this.”

He took the manuscript from me and carefully placed it on the couch’s arm next to his coffee cup. “So,” he asked.

I knew I had to be careful “Well,” I said, “it moves really well. The characters are funny and dead-on.”

“. . . You been drinking?”

“Not really. I was sipping a glass of wine in the sun.”

“Jesus, two sons in their thirties and they’re both ne’er-do-well boozers.”

“A glass of wine, Pop. C’mon. No big deal.”

“Okay, let’s hear it. Your feedback.”

“Well, look, I mean, what you’ve got here is a story about you and your father. The son coming to help his old man build a stone smokehouse.”

“Go on.”

“A comfortable, successful, middle-aged writer leaving Malibu to visit his papa because he’s afraid the old man’s going to die.”

“I’m familiar with the plot, kid.”

“Well, like I said, it reads very well but I’m not sure about the commercial possibility of this kind of book. I mean, who’s your audience? What publisher is going to take something like this seriously as marketable fiction?”

John Fante glared at me, then lit a cigarette. “Listen closely. There’s a remote possibility that you might learn something: First, I don’t give a damn if my work is commercial or not.”

“C’mon, of course you do.”

“Silence, please. I’m the writer. If what I write is good, then people will read it. That’s why literature exists. An author puts his heart and his guts on the page. For your information, a good novel can change the world. Keep that in mind before you attempt to sit down at a typewriter. Never waste time on something you don’t believe in yourself. So, did you like what you read?”

“Sure.”

“Did it involve you? Did it have an impact?”

“Sure. Of course.”

“End of discussion.”

I never forgot the conversation.

Years later, in my own work, I came to realize my father’s advice. Sadly, most of the publishing industry in America for years had been a glut of tell-all and entertainment and romance novels, motivated almost entirely by bottom-line profit. Good literary fiction has become harder and harder to find. Fewer writers willing to expose themselves and write about their own experiences in a way that contributes to the human condition—that speaks to the soul of the reader—are on the bookshelves. For me, the privilege of possessing the reader’s mind with my words in a novel for hours and days at a time, sharing my personal truth, is a great gift. As it was for my father, John Fante, being a writer is not simply a job. It is an extraordinary and precious calling.