A musician named Sam introduced me to Ask the Dust when I was in my early twenties. It was exactly the book I needed at the time. Sam had heard me read at the Vault, a house-based, performance space in Queens, and afterwards asked me if I had read John Fante. I told him I hadn’t, and didn’t know who Fante was. Sam’s face lit up. I got something for you, he said. That something was given to me when Sam and I met at his house to do some spoken word and music recording. He gifted me a copy of the Black Sparrow edition of Ask the Dust and told me it would change my life. I read it in a couple of nights and was blown away. The romantic solipsist in me fell deeply into the echoes and correspondences of mine and Arturo Bandini’s life (Bandini being Fante’s alter-ego): the Italian-American background, growing up in a household of chaos and addiction, the burning need to escape from home, the outsized literary ambitions. It was the classic sense of lesser-than desperately seeking more-than in order to feel important, validated, confirmed, seen, heard. Ask the Dust, in its hardboiled innate lyricism (thinly concealing wounds and inflammable sensitivities), its flinty phlegmatic timbre, and seismically registered mood swings, lodged itself in my heart and became one of my mini-bibles and crooked valentines.