Free The Brotherhood of the Grape by John Fante Page A

book called Fun and Profit in Dishwashing . It was as mad as Hernandez himself. I used to fall asleep listening to him read the manuscript, convulsing with pleasure. One of his chapters was “The Mystery of Hot Water,” another, “Clean Hands Make Clean Minds.”
    But the job was exhausting, the floor always submerged from leaking pipes, and the food inedible. I quit to work in the garment district pushing dress racks and running errands for everyone. I had a dozen bosses who kept me rushing after coffee, sandwiches, newspapers and a hundred other trifles. One of them owned an independent cab service and offered me a job driving at night. I accepted though I knew nothing of the huge, complicated city. For eight hours I cruised downtown Los Angeles that first night without catching a single fare. My boss assured me that things would improve when the dry spell ended, and to pray for rain.
    The following night I had my first customers, a black man and his girl. The man asked to be driven to Ninety-sixth and Central Avenue-As I consulted a map of the city he said, “You mean to tell me you don’t know where Ninety-sixth and Central is?” I told him I was new in town. “I’ll show you the way,” he said. “Down one block and turn left.”
    For two hours I followed his directions, all the way to San Bernardino, where I was told to stop in a tractless, houseless wasteland without street lights or sidewalks. I felt the barrel of a pistol in my ear as he ordered me out of the car. His girlfriend searched me and took all I possessed, nine dollars. They drove off, leaving me there in a place resembling Death Valley.
    As daylight pulsed in the east, a police car came up silently and found me walking toward what appeared to be the lights of a distant city. I spent three hours in the San Bernardino Police Station being grilled mercilessly by two detectives who suspected me of being AWOL or draft-dodging. The 4-F status of my draft card did not impress them. They fingerprinted me and ran a check. At noon they released me, without breakfast or even coffee, and ordered me out of town. They were bad guys: they wouldn’t even give me directions.
    I got out on the street and began to ask passers-by. Nobody seemed to know how to get out of San Bernardino, so I finally found it myself. I thumbed for an hour before a truck stopped. The driver wasn’t going to Los Angeles but to Wilmington. Good enough. Anything was better than San Bernardino. When I told him of being robbed and arrested he laughed. “Lotsa luck,” he said as he let me off on Wilmington Boulevard.
    Wilmington was paranoid, a seaport town in the midst of war. It did not seem to have been laid out so much as dumped out. Big trucks hogged the streets, roaring through crowded intersections where soldiers, sailors and civilians ignored traffic signals in the middle of honking claxons and cursing drivers. I moved with the flow of people, aimlessly following a surge down Avalon Boulevard, I was tired, dirty and dazed, tumbled like a cork along a street of oil derricks, factories, lumberyards, piles of girders and steel pipe, row upon row of army tanks and trucks, poolhalls, poker palaces, used-car lots, and even an amusement park with a merry-go-round and a Ferris wheel. The laughter of women in bars flooded the streets. Hustlers leaned in doorways, drunks sat on the curb, smiling cops cruised in bemused attention. Where was I? Liverpool? Singapore? Marseilles? I thought of my father, how he would have loved this singular place—the gambling, the bars, the buildings shooting up on every empty piece of land.
    Hunger. I smelled the tomato sauce, the pizza coming from an Italian restaurant. I turned the corner and moved down the alley to the rear of the place. As I knocked on the black screen door a cloud of flies whined away and I saw the face of an Italian woman peering out, a plump woman in her forties, round as a meatball. I’ll work for something to eat, I said. She was