Ask the Dust/3, a Realization

“That’s when I walked down the street toward Angel's Flight, wondering what would I do that day. But there was nothing to do, and so I decided to walk around town." — John Fante

Wall of art inside The Last Bookstore PHOTO:KCS

Searching for a theme in the art that covers one complete wall inside The Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles,  I came up blank.

"Isn't it great?" said Barbara.

"I don't get it?"

"It's the way in which the art is arranged to fill the entire wall."

"Oh... yeah."

I was looking at the trees not seeing the forest.

There's a great deal to see at The Last Bookstore which has been featured in magazines, television, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and anywhere better mouse traps are found. It's like walking into the Centre Pompidou in Paris or strolling through the dusty aisles of eye-candy at Burning Man. You're liable to see anything. Presentation is key.

Silly me. I was hunting for a particular book.

PHOTO:KCS

Walking from Angel's Flight to The Last Bookstore felt safe. Traffic was muffled by the old buildings of Los Angeles that speak of a different period with gargoyles and columns, what might be called substance. These old girls have withstood earthquakes, sig alerts, heat waves, high winds, low lives and acid smog. We passed through a cloud of sour air near a small plaza, perhaps a reminder of where we were or who we are. We were inside the axis of our nation's second largest city amid a core of quietude, similar to the eye of a hurricane, insulated from the greater tumult that surrounded us.

The Last Bookstore sits on the corner of Spring and Fifth streets occupying a 100-year-old building that was once a bank. It's the brainchild of Josh Spencer who started selling used books in a downtown loft in 2005. The store encompasses 22,000 sq. ft. that includes two floors and the bank's original vault. Here you will find, according to its website, "a record store, a comic book store, five art studios, an epic yarn shop, a famous book tunnel, a mammoth head and unexpected nooks of funkiness."

To enter you must pass through a security check that reminded me of an experience at LAX. I get it. Many visitors enter in a constant flow. At least we didn't need a QR code.

The overall funkiness is, Spencer admits, designed to capture the Instagram crowd who are wont to shoot "reels" of the quirky nooks and set ups. This provides instant free advertising, which seems to be working. Several movies have taken advantage of the location including Gone Girl (2014) and the Netflix series, Crime Scene: The Vanishing of the Cecil Hotel (2021).

I wish we would have had more time to explore. The afternoon was moving toward sundown and I didn't want to drive the freeways back to Manhattan Beach in the dark. I found the fiction department and began madly searching authors under the letter "F." Surely The Last Bookstore in Los Angeles would have at least one copy of Ask the Dust by John Fante. Surely they would have sought and shelved this classic novel of old Los Angeles; the "greatest novel ever written about Los Angeles."

I couldn't find a single book by Fante or his son, Dan Fante. Although I would caution anyone against reading the son's morbidly revolting novel, Point Doom (2013), set in Malibu. Take my word. Unless you have a taste for the macabre. He must have had a grudge against one of the town's filmmakers, or wrote the book as a pejorative metaphor of the industry itself and the way it treats people. Or perhaps the way we treat each other.

Fante the Father was a prodigious writer and earned his bread and butter penning screenplays. In 2010, a small cadre of literary activists were successful in getting the city of Los Angeles to designate the downtown corner of Fifth and Grand streets as "John Fante Square." The LA Times described him as "a chronicler of downtown, its unloved and overlooked residents, its dirty sidewalks and cheap bars."

The only physical reminder that he existed is a solitary, barely noticed sign on a street post.

Photo by unknown photographer of sign on corner of Fifth and Grand streets identifying John Fante Square. Probably taken from inside a moving car with the window closed blurring the letters.

We exited The Last Bookstore, walked back to Angel's Flight and rode uphill to the plaza station and found our car in the covered lot. Our parking tab was I'm sure more than six months rent for a room on Bunker Hill in 1940. It had been a swell afternoon in old downtown LA starting with a beef dip sandwich at Philippe's.

Old map of Los Angeles area with downtown colored in.

Epilogue:

This trip to Los Angeles took place a week or more before the horrific wildfires that blazed through Pacific Palisades and Altadena and other pockets of LA spurred by Santa Ana winds of up to 100-mph. I wrote my first installment of this story before the fires. 

We left town on PCH through Malibu past the familiar beach houses between the road and the ocean; many now reduced to ash. Our daughter Vanessa and her family live on the inland side of nearby Topanga Canyon. She said the winds were terrifying, the devastation “incomprehensible.” 

Thankfully, they are safe but ready to evacuate in case.

Nearly 200 novels have been written about the natural risks of living in Los Angeles and end-of-world scenarios there, according to the LA Times. Now there will be more. Wildfires and earthquakes are expected. The fires when I was growing up sparked in September. They were mostly confined to the dry-scrub undeveloped hills. Today the fires are year-round and reach buildings where people live. 

Good luck, Los Angeles. Good luck to all.

"All that was good in me thrilled in my heart at that moment, all that I hoped for in the profound, obscure meaning of my existence. Here was the endlessly mute placidity of nature, indifferent to the great city; here was the desert beneath these streets, around these streets, waiting for the city to die, to cover it with timeless sand once more."  from Ask the Dust by John Fante