Fante’s Child by John McMahon

Ten years of living with Parkinson’s led to a stroke induced coma, brain surgery, half a year of rehabilitation, and seriously impaired motor skills. Two years later my father has slipped behind the veil of dementia so now he lives at the Pine Hills Adult Care Center. A picturesque name for a place where the cleaning fluids never quite manage to cover up the reek of urine. It's a low, sprawling southern California style stucco complex just minutes from a world class golf course where the aged and infirm are stored in front of televisions, spoon fed  and toileted until they quietly die alone. 

I visit my father. I sit in one of the two chairs facing his bed festooned with chrome bars where he's propped up against two pillows watching television with a look of consternation on his face as if he can almost follow the plot lines but I can see they keep getting tangled in his failing brain. I fill his water glass and he looks at me as if I'm a waiter; if he knows me he doesn't let on.

His dementia is passive. He doesn't scream and jerk or throw his food or smear shit on the walls, so there's no need to restrain him. The staff, who are are mostly squat Mexican women, like him because he's easy to handle. They coo compliments into his ear as they toddle him off to the bathroom where they change his diaper. They tell him how handsome and what a strong man he is with accents he would have mocked in his lucidity.   

There's no way to ignore the message of death this place emits. The interior palette is a muted collection of umbers, ochers and charcoals; cold earth colors. The furniture is cheap stuff sealed in plastic so it can be wiped clean and turned over in a hurry. Surfaces are non-slip and all edges are curved for safety. Thin voices scratch through the hallways just audible over the din of televisions asking the same hollow questions hour after hour. 

A doctor called me to talk about a urinary tract infection, a serious and recurring one my father developed which may or may not require hospitalization based on his insurance or my ability to pay for it. 

Doctor Liam Owen shook my hand without making eye contact. I thought he would take me aside to talk about what was happening, but he spoke where he stood between my chair and the bed, as if my father didn’t exist. He told me he was trying to make a thorough review of my father's medical history but was stymied at 1961. His accent was smooth and bass heavy, plush as velvet.  

“Did you contact the VA?” I asked.

“Yes there is no problem there, they have his records from the point he was enlisted to the navy, but from before he changed his name they cannot give me any information. I wondered if you can assist me with this?” 

He waited, his eyes and mouth held in an expression of expectation but I was taking a three beat. Shaking my head and turning up a rueful smile to show that I was both slightly amused and totally bewildered. 

“My father never changed his name. Do you mean my father? I think you've made a mistake, do you have the right chart?”

The center was in a constant state of flux with patients either returning to their homes or going into the ground. The staff were little more than minimum wage caretakers and almost always confused, bringing the wrong pills, meals, and paperwork. 

“Your father's name is Art Bandini?”

“It is.”

“And your name is Arthur Bandini?”

“Right and his father was Arturo Bandini, you see? We all have the same name.”

The doctor shook his head and grimaced slightly as he flipped his papers. “Can you tell me a little about your father's background?” 

“Maybe, what do you need to know?” Making a point to check the time. I am not a busy man, but I've lost hours in the place working out conflicts.  

“I would like to know where he came from, so that I might continue my search for his early medical records.”

“What does this have to do with a urinary tract infection?”

“It doesn't, that's a different issue. I am very interested in the heredity paths of Parkinson’s, you see. Do you know if your grandfather had symptoms of Parkinson’s, what they might have called palsy in that day?”

“No. I never met my grandfather. He died before I was born but my father had cut off contact with him years before that and didn't talk much about him.”

“He was abusive? A drinker perhaps?”

“That's what my father said.” 

What my father really used to say was that the man was a brute and a near imbecile. That he worked fourteen hours a day in the summer and drank all day in the winter. That he stole money from his own children. That he gambled, fought and whored on an almost daily basis. That he berated his daughters and beat his sons. That when my grandmother was dying the old man was screwing the nurse in their marital bed. That he fought with him about it and was beaten unconscious when he was only thirteen. 

“He is from here?” 

“Denver, came down to LA when he was just a kid, early 1950s. I'm not sure of the date.” 

“So your father ran away from home in Denver and came to LA in order to work?”

“Odd jobs mostly. I think he worked in a cannery for awhile, where he developed his special love for Filipinos,” I joked.  

“I see,” the doctor chuckled.

“Who did he stay with, just a child all alone? He had some other family there or friends to live with?”

“He stayed alone. He lived in a cheap hotel around Bunker Hill, they tore it down long ago. He was trying to be a writer but...,” and I paused there because I had conflicting memories, it seemed he sometimes talked of trying to be a writer, submitting short stories to magazines in the East, and that he had some success. He sold one for what at the time was a lot of money, a story about a dog?

But then sometimes he would say he had come to play ball. That he was the best pitcher in Denver and he had an interview with the Dodgers. But had the Dodgers even been in LA at the time? I don't know much about baseball and for someone who had been scouted for the majors at thirteen or fourteen I couldn't ever remember the old man watching a game.

“Doc, how is any of this relevant to my father's infection or Parkinson’s or health at all? I don’t understand what you're looking for here.” 

“Yes, I am being a bit elusive. You see I'm very much intrigued. When I first saw his name I smiled because I have never met anyone of that perhaps infamous name before, and now that I have discovered he changed his name to that and has told you this history of Denver, his father, the cannery, writing The Little Brown Dog, I am also in shock from the mystery.” 

I had no idea what this doctor was rambling about. I looked past him at my father and watched his face light up and go foul along with the antics of two women on The Screaming Ladies of New Orleans episode he was watching. The old man had come all the way around the loop to near infancy. Overjoyed at loud sounds and bright lights again. Not a care in the world, everything was brand new every day. The good natured, foul mouthed bigot who raised me was gone. And the doctor continued talking about him as he stood between us without ever even glancing at him.  

“None of this is related to his health but it is all strong evidence that he indeed changed his name to Art Bandini and borrowed the story of his childhood from him as well, or at least pieced it together from a number of Fante books.”

“What's a Fante Book?” I asked. I had been called in to discuss a medical problem but found myself listening to the fantastic notions of a lunatic doctor. I thought he was referring to something from his homeland. Some book of magic, a Fante Book sounded very Gaelic to me.

“You are unfamiliar with the writer John Fante? Most Americans are unfortunately. And no one has ever commented to you about your name, the name of the great Arturo Bandini?” He was smiling broadly as he asked this, a bright white rift of teeth across his bright red face. 

“Arthur, my name is Arthur, my grandfather was Arturo.”

He removed a prescription pad from his pocket and wrote out the name John Fante with a list of titles beneath it and handed this slip of paper to me. “Find these books and read them. See if the stories do not emulate the ones your father told to you, or vice-a-versa as it would be. Finally he turned to my father and resting his hand on his thin arm asked, “How are you today Mr. Bandini?”

My father looked from the television into the man's face and said, “What's up doc?” in a moment of near clarity and then regressed again, laughing to himself as his attention was drawn back to the middle aged women drunkenly berating one another. 

“Now if you will come with me to billing, we can examine this problem of how to get the insurance to pay their fair share for his hospital treatment.” 

I sat through the twenty minutes or so of insurance speak in a mind glaze, listening but not hearing what the tubby woman in scrubs was saying about co-payments and state allowances. “My father was in the Navy for fifteen years, doesn't his pension cover this?” I asked at one point. The clerk passed a withering glance over me and handed me a thick sheaf of papers to take home and review. 

I drove to the nearest bookstore. A multistory complex of play areas and cafes where people lounged and socialized over digital networks with friends they would never meet face to face. I didn't know where to find any of the books the doctor had prescribed on his pad so I took it to the information desk where the boy did a search on the store's database. He handed back my list and shrugged; they had no books by John Fante. 

The boy asked a manager my age who seemed to actually know something about the writer and he directed me to a used book store, something that never occurred to me. Like record stores, they have vanished from my mindscape. 

It was a cool, gray day. June gloom we call it here. A perfect day to drive. I turned forty-five three months earlier and to compensate for feeling so old I bought a cheap sports car that nevertheless provides a high grin factor. I took the car out on the Pacific Coast Highway and wove it through traffic with the top down, letting the engine rev high even at slow speeds to give me the feeling of racing dangerously. 

The bookstore was a one room shop front with a long counter parallel to the street side window and lined floor to ceiling with shelves that divided the length into five aisles. The middle aged woman sitting behind the counter in a low slung chair flipping through a soft cover glanced up when I made the bell ring on the door, smiled at me and went back to reading. She hadn’t heard that customers must be confronted the moment they enter a place of business. The store was steeped in a rich aroma of old paper, strong coffee, and cat piss. 

Down the center aisle the woman’s male counterpart stood with a rolling tray of books he was either shelving or pricing. They had the same disheveled hair and gray toned wardrobe. He also smiled, and greeted me by holding out a book and asking if I had ever read the author. I shrugged and he nodded once.

“A must read, should be on everyone’s lifetime list.”

I looked around at the shelves hoping to discover how things were arranged. I thought about the Dewey decimal system, something like author – subject - date, perhaps the reverse. I looked at my slip of paper.

“Help you find something?”

“Yeah I have this list.” 

He took the script from me and grinned. “Doctor’s orders eh, what ails you?” 

I had no answer. I was a middle aged man experiencing signs of a mild mid-life crisis who had just had his entire family history wiped clean. His self identity put into doubt by an odd doctor from a boggy isle. Was there a name for such a thing?

“The Bandini Quartet,” the proprietor commented as he led me down the aisle, across one and back toward the front. Three shelves from the floor he pulled two of the three titles and handed them to me spine first. 

"This is all I have right now. Fante comes in and goes out just as fast."

"He's famous?" 

"Not so famous but one of America's finest. Died in poverty and forgotten for years of course, but that's how writers do."     

He rang the books up and put them in a second or third hand paper bag which he handed me along with a receipt. The prices were so low the transaction seemed audacious. The time and effort that went into the sale couldn't have been worth the profit margin. As a financial adviser I wanted to tell him to close up immediately. That each minute of opening time was putting them further into the hole and maybe under my breath suggest torching the place for the insurance. 

I took the books and drove down to Del Mar to a little bar I know called the Saddle. Though it's miles from the track the clientele are mostly degenerate gamblers and the bartender covers any side action with a Michigan roll thick enough to choke a horse. 

I took a seat in the back with a rum old fashioned. The side door was propped open to air the place and I could just get a glimpse of the beach through the eucalyptus trees that closed in the parking lot. There were sunbathers sheltered behind wind blinds despite there being no sun and a line of surfers bobbed in the cold water waiting for a set to roll in. I opened the slimmer of the two volumes, 1933 Was A Bad Year and began to read. 

I read through the book with three drinks exclaiming out loud. The words were Fante's but the voice in my head was my father's talking about the cold Denver winters, of the little house where his mother slaved over the stove and his old man ruled as a ham fisted tyrant. The boy, the main character, not Arturo Bandini but he all the same, dreamed of going to Southern California and pitching in the big leagues. It was all he thought about, pitching and escaping Denver even as he apprenticed as a mason to his father. It was my father's childhood.

I never knew my father to read. Never saw him with a book or a magazine. Newspapers he rustled through but mostly to get to the funnies. He had been a sailor for a decade and a half so maybe he spent the long empty hours reading on deck and then when his hitch was up tossed the habit like some might drop smoking or drinking, but I have never heard of that before and nothing in his personality hinted at a literary bent. 

His habit was to come home from work and flip on the T.V. even before he opened his first beer. My father's relationship with television was a love match. My mother blew in and out of our lives as her needs determined. She was a revolving figure that by the age of five or six I more or less put out of my mind and when she would suddenly appear in our kitchen I thought of her as a distant friend of my father's. Television though was always on, asleep or awake, drunk and sober, morning and night, television voices filled the rooms of our house.   

I got home to my empty condo. I had drunk too much to be sober but not enough to be drunk and my head throbbed. I needed to eat but had no appetite. I sat down at the oval table that separates my kitchen from the living space and stared at the back of The Brotherhood of The Grape, afraid to open it.

My identity was proving to be a fantasy that my father had spun based on the fiction of a long dead writer I can't believe he ever read. I pulled up Fante's wiki page and read through his biography. It was much the same as Bandini's; both his character and my father's alias. Fante died broke and mostly unknown as the bookstore owner had said but also blind and limbless from diabetes. This surrogate father of mine, infamous and celebrated today spent his last days in the absolute dark with no way to even feel his way out. 

He was everything I thought my father was. His father was my grandfather up until that morning. Sitting at my table I was a man without a history, patrimony or place in the world. My grandmother never made sausage and peppers. My grandfather didn't make his own dago red in the basement, my father didn't run away from the icy winters to toil in the canneries and fight with Filipinos. He was never the top pitching prospect in Colorado. He didn't write short stories in a basement room of a Bunker Hill hotel. I went to bed and dreamed of family. 

   
In my mind's eye my grandfather looked like Burt Young, Rocky Balboa's miscreant brother-in-law Pauli. A thick voweled, dull witted man who was easily amused and quick to violence. My grandmother may as well have been Adrian, Rocky's skinny, cringing wife who lived in the kitchen, forever in a house dress. In my dreams that night these old comforts slipped away from me. 

I dreamed of myself staring into a mirror, peeling layers of featureless skin from my face like the skeins of dried glue I would pull off the backs of my hands when I was in elementary school. There was no end to the layers of skin I shed, it piled up on the sink in front of me like reams of old parchment but a face never emerged.

I returned to the Pines center after two days having read The Brotherhood of the Grape and Ask The Dust. I didn't get Fante as a writer. There wasn't much to the stories but they went on at length. He took three and four paragraphs to describe something I could sum up in a few words; a jug of wine, a pool cue, the snow bank. Too many words.

I found my father sitting up in his bed, his spine arched and shoulders pinned back with his knees pulled almost to his chest. His face was frozen in a rictus of dyskinesia. The seizure of muscles that comes in time with the drug therapy of Parkinson’s disease. I stood in the doorway and watched as his arms involuntarily, rotated stiffly and his neck craned unnaturally. There was nothing to be done about it. When the levels of Levadopa he takes to stabilize the dementia lessens dyskinesia sets in. It's really only when his body is wracked with the involuntary tics and tremors of dyskinesia that he regains lucidity enough to complain. 

“Dad?”

“Hey,” his head crooked on his neck. “These damned muscle spasms. I can't even watch T.V.”

“Can I get you anything?”

“There's nothing to do. I had my pills. Sit down. It'll pass.” 

“I wanted to ask you something. Do you know the writer John Fante? You ever hear about him?” I wasn't sure if he knew who I was. 

“Who? What writer, how do you mean?”

“This guy, Fante, he was a writer in LA, came from Denver.”

The old man's head snapped to look over, his expression twisted into an unreadable mask. “Came from Denver eh, what part?” 

“About like you I guess. He was Italian. His parents came over. His father was a mason from Abruzzo.” 

“No shit, like your grandfather. Course there was a lot of 'em there back then. Your grandfather used to say...” he got there when his face went slack and his body relaxed, released from the dyskentic grip.

Doctor Owen filled the doorway. “Mr. Bandini's. How are you both this afternoon?” 

My father turned a tired glance at the man before going back to scanning through his channels. I stood and the doctor saw the books I had laid on the other chair. 

“And you, Arthur? Were you able to find some information on your father's background. Something beyond what Mr. Fante wrote?” 

“There's nowhere to look. I only know what my father told me, I never questioned it.”

“Hadn't anyone ever recognized your name before? Hasn't anyone ever asked you about the name Fante? Didn't you ever wonder how your fair skin, blonde hair and blue eyes came to be from such an Italian parentage?”

“I never thought there was a question to be asked until I read those books.” 

“What did you read? Did you get the Bandini quartet?”

“It's all very familiar. Maybe you're right, I mean you must be right, it can't be coincidence. The names, Denver, the house, the food and basement wine. It's all the same. Baseball and writing! He took this man's identity.”

“The character's identity. Fante created a character to fictionalize his life, your father assumed that identity to obscure his history and passed it on to you who took it as his patrimony, and now you have discovered this and closed the cycle, except, except...”

“That now I have no idea who I am.”

The doctor's wide grin shrank and he pursed his lips into thick wattles. “I will leave you with your father now.”

I went to to the chair near my father's bed. I could see from his expression that he had slid back into the full of dementia. It was a particularity cruel facet of his disease that the only thing that brought him through the fog was the torment of dyskenisia. 

“Dad you gotta' tell me about this. Why did you change your name? What's with this Fante guy? What happened? Did something happen before you joined the Navy? Something so bad that you hid from your family?”

“I was in the Navy,” he said.

“I know Dad, but what about before that, where did you live, what was your name?”

He looked at me. Recognition showed in his eyes. I pulled my chair closer and he spoke to me with his hand on my arm.

“I was in the Navy. I was a sailor boy, and you were the boy of the sailor boy. I was a sailor boy and you were my boy, the boy of a sailor boy. I was a little sailor boy and you were my boy. The boy of a sailor boy.” He repeated it until it became a sing song mantra that seemed to amuse him to no end. Tears streamed down his cheeks but they were only a side effect of his condition. 

On the drive home I stopped at a pharmacy and bought a four dollar frame and a roll of cello tape. At the table in my kitchen cum living room I did an image search for John Fante and scrolled through the photos. He came at all ages, young and hungry looking. A bit older in a peacoat with his collar snapped up and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. There were shots of him shirtless at the beach with a little boy. Then old and jug-eared, maybe posing with his wife, a fat cigar jammed into his mouth. The one I printed fixed him at his desk glaring at his typewriter being very much the writer. I clipped and taped it into the frame and hung it on the wall next to one of my father taken on a windy day with him leaning against the fender of the first new car he ever bought.

John McMahon is a painter and writer who has spent the last twenty years traveling and working in Asia. His work can be seen on platforms and publications all across the English speaking world. Links to all his work can be found at mcmahonwrites.com.