There was Heilman, who belonged to the Book of the Month Club. A huge man with arms like logs and legs tight in his pants. He was a bank teller. He had a wife in Moline, Illinois and a son at the University of Chicago. He hated the southwest, his hatred bulging from his big face, but his health was bad, and he was doomed to stay here or die. He sneered at everything western. He was sick after every intersectional football game that saw the east defeated. He spat when you mentioned the Trojans. He hated the sun, cursed the fog, denounced the rain, dreamed always of the snows of the middle-west. Once a month his letter box had a big package. I saw him in the lobby, always reading. He wouldn’t lend me his books.

‘A matter of principle,’ Heilman said.

But he gave me the Book of the Month Club News, a little magazine about new books. Every month he left it in my letter box.

And the redheaded girl from St Louis who always asked about the Filipinos. Where did they live? How many were there? Did I know any of them? A gaunt redheaded girl, with brown freckles below the neckline of her dress, out here from St Louis. She wore green all the time, her copper head too startling for her beauty, her eyes too grey for her face. She got a job in a laundry, but the pay was too little, so she quit. She too wandered the warm streets. Once she lent me a quarter, another time, postage stamps. Endlessly she spoke of the Filipinos, pitied them, thought them so brave in the face of prejudice. One day she was gone, and another day I saw her again, walking the streets, her copper hair catching sunbeams, a short Filipino holding her arm. He was very proud of her. His padded shoulders and tight waisted suit were the ultimate of tenderloin fashion, but even with the high leather heels he was a foot shorter than she.

Of them all, only one read The Little Dog Laughed. Those first days I autographed a great number of copies, brought them upstairs to the waiting room. Five or six copies, and I placed them conspicuously everywhere, on the library table, on the divan, even in the deep leather chairs so that to sit down you had to pick them up. Nobody read them, not a soul, except one. For a week they were spread about, but they were hardly touched. Even when the Japanese boy dusted that room he never so much as lifted them from where they lay. In the evenings people played bridge in there, and a group of the old guests gathered to talk and relax. I slipped in, found a chair, and watched. It was disheartening. A big woman in one of the deep chairs had even seated herself upon a copy, not bothering to remove it. A day came when the Japanese boy piled the copies neatly together on the library table. They gathered dust. Once in a while, every few days, I rubbed my handkerchief over them and scattered them about. They always returned untouched to the neat stack on the library table. Maybe they knew I had written it, and deliberately avoided it. Maybe they simply didn’t care. Not even Heilman, with all his reading. Not even the landlady. I shook my head: they were very foolish, all of them. It was a story about their own middle-west, about Colorado and a snowstorm, and there they were with their uprooted souls and sun-burned faces, dying in a blazing desert, and the cool homelands from whence they came were so near at hand, right there in the pages of that little magazine. And I thought, ah well, it was ever thus - Poe, Whitman, Heine, Dreiser, and now Bandini; thinking that, I was not so hurt, not so lonely.