Dust to dust

Notes on summer and desire

Dear summer, dear friend and lover, you have once again captured my heart in your hands. The sun is wrenching sweat out of me when I go on a daily run along the river trail. I am helpless and basking in the daylight. And I consider it a blessing to feel those love notes dripping down my skin. 

Dear summer, I go outside, and I fall in love, and I don’t know who is to blame: your sunsets or my hopeless heart? I have embraced your arrival, and once again you have me thinking about desire. Around this time of year, I spend my days trying to describe the feeling of longing, I spend nights drenched in desperation trying to describe all the colors on the wings of butterflies fluttering in my chest. And speaking of desire in the threshold of your season, dear summer, my friend and lover, I’m here with a question: have you read “Ask the Dust” by John Fante? I think this messy novel uniquely captures the aching joy of broken hearts melting together in the summer. 

Released in 1939, “Ask the Dust” was written by Fante, an Italian-American born in Boulder who later journeyed to Los Angeles, hoping to break through as a writer. Much of Fante’s fiction traces his own life through his alter ego, Arturo Bandini. We meet Arturo in the pages of “Ask the Dust,” where he is dreaming big in L.A. during the Great Depression. Arturo lives in squalor, subsisting on oranges in a run-down hotel on Bunker Hill. And maybe worst of all, he has a bad case of writer’s block. One summer night, Arturo spends his last nickel at a bar, “an old style place with sawdust on the floor, crudely drawn nudes smeared across the walls, where the past remains unaltered.” He orders a cup of coffee from a Mexican waitress named Camilla Lopez. The coffee is terrible but Camilla intrigues him. Arturo’s arrogance and insecurity make for several bad first impressions, but eventually he and Camilla find themselves in a cathartic, messy on/off relationship.  

Throughout the novel, dust keeps returning. In Arturo’s narration, he points out the dust of the city, the dust of the desert, the dust of mortality waiting for us: “The world was dust, and dust it would become.” But there’s one semi-sweet scene between Arturo and Camilla that stands out. The two go out for a drive, and Camilla takes him to the Pacific Palisades. “From below rose the roar of the sea. Far out fogbanks crept toward the land, an army of ghosts crawling on their bellies,” he observes. “The air was so clean. We breathed in gratefully. There was no dust here.” In this place of no dust in the dead of night, the two go for a swim; they share a blanket on the beach, then they share a kiss. As morning approaches Camilla considers following Arturo back to his room, but he points out that the hotel doesn’t allow Mexicans. After a goodnight kiss, Camilla says something strange and significant. “This was such a beautiful night. It won’t ever happen again,” she tells Arturo Bandini. The lovesick writer retreats to his solitary room, on fire with sadness and desire.  

Summer, I’m sure you have seen these romantics before: misfit boys and girls in America whose lives intersect for only a moment, and it feels dreamlike: the small talk that turns into long nights, the look of longing in their eyes, the sound of leaving in their voice. Summer, do you notice the way people start to feel like characters in their favorite novels? I’m sure you have witnessed the way two people step away from the crowd, desiring a magical night of human connection while sharing a cigarette. It’s only you and the moon witnessing the silence, while the couple exhale smoke from pursed lips. Their starry eyes stare up toward a starry night on a street corner between forever and fleeting. 

I believe the most beautiful things begin and end in the desert. And “Ask the Dust” ends in the Mojave Desert. Arturo has released his first novel, which in a metafictional twist is a version of “Ask the Dust.” He wants to give Camilla a copy but he cannot find her. This sends him into the desert, trying to retrace her wandering steps, but as far as Arturo knows, she has vanished. And all he can do is throw a copy of his debut novel into the desert, leaving it for the hungry lonely ghosts. 

Dear summer, around this time of year, I hear minor chords in the twilight, and I’m haunted by this novel full of lost people, driftless with desire. I adore Arturo and Camilla, because they are anti-heroes and iron-willed fuck-ups, aching for redemption. The two are fictional but they are so human in their flaws and desires. Maybe what Camilla said earlier is true: those beautiful nights won’t ever happen again. But, dear summer, when you return with roses, your sunsets say maybe beauty can happen again, tonight or tomorrow.