Fridays at Enrico's

by Don Carpenter

  FRIDAYS AT

  ENRICO’S

  Copyright © 2014 by The Estate of Don Carpenter

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Carpenter, Don.

  Fridays at Enrico’s : a novel / Don Carpenter;

  [edited, with introduction, by] Jonathan Lethem.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-61902-376-5 (eBook)

  1.Beat generation—Fiction. 2.Authors, American—20th century—Fiction. 3.San Francisco (Calif.)—History—20th century—Fiction. 4.Portland (Ore.)—History—20th century—Fiction.I. Lethem, Jonathan. II. Title.

  PS3553.A76F85 2014

  813’.54—dc23

  2013043960

  COUNTERPOINT

  1919 Fifth Street

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10987654321

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE:

  Jaime and Charlie

  PART TWO:

  The Portland Group

  PART THREE:

  The Golden Gate

  PART FOUR:

  C Block

  PART FIVE:

  Freedom

  PART SIX:

  The Literary Life

  Finishing Carpenter:

  An Afterword

  FRIDAYS AT

  ENRICO’S

  PART ONE

  Jaime and Charlie

  1.

  Jaime and Charlie got married in a log chapel in South Lake Tahoe the night before their last finals. Heading back to San Francisco the next day, hung over and drinking bottles of Miller’s, Charlie decided that college was a fraud, and although he was one final from a master’s degree, an easy final, he was damned if he would take the damned test. Charlie wasn’t driving. He didn’t have the strength. Jaime was erect behind the wheel, barely able to see over it, only five feet tall, her nose up, her bloodshot blue eyes hidden behind dark glasses, the hot wind blowing her blonde, almost white hair. She was nineteen years old.

  “I’m not gonna take that goddamn final,” he said. He had seen through college. The time, he now realized with hungover chagrin, would have been better spent just lying around reading. He explained this to his new bride as they drove across the flat hot Sacramento Valley.

  “Or I could just veer into the oncoming traffic,” she said, after he finished.

  Charlie rummaged around in the glove compartment, looking for something to take away the pain. Beer was not enough. He found an Alka-Seltzer in its ragged foil package. It would help, if he could find a way to get it down. He thought about crumbling it and dropping the fragments into his bottle of beer. He thought about putting the wafer on his tongue and taking a big swig. He thought about James Joyce’s “Grace” and smiled.

  “Are you serious?” Jaime asked him.

  “About what?” he asked.

  She loved Charlie, but in many ways he was a big baby. He had the nicest smile she had ever seen, wide, bland, easy, the smile of a man who had seen some life and enjoyed what he saw. Charlie was one of the Korean War veterans in the department. He was writing a long novel about his experiences in the war. He was self-educated but brilliant, and everyone thought that of them all, Charlie was the one who would probably become famous. Not that any of that mattered to Jaime. She knew herself to be a better writer than Charlie, but she lacked his life experiences. They had fallen together quite naturally. Charlie sat behind her in Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s literature class. It had been Jaime’s first day of classes at San Francisco State and she was nervous. Walter Clark, a big bear of a man wearing a faded old sweatshirt instead of the usual suit and tie, was telling the thirty students in front of him which books they would be reading. Jaime was trying to take notes, but she smelled liquor breath coming from behind her and for some reason it irritated her. She turned to glare at Charlie.

  “Would you please not sigh so loud?” she heard herself saying to this smiling man of about thirty.

  “Sorry,” he said. His voice was thrillingly deep. She could not help noticing the legal-sized pad of yellow paper on which he was drawing cartoon pictures of naked women. She raised an eyebrow to let him know what she thought of his art abilities, and turned back to her note-taking. After class as she was walking out of the HSS Building into the small courtyard facing Nineteenth Avenue, Charlie caught up to her. He was dressed in an old fatigue jacket, jeans, and dirty motorcycle boots. San Francisco State in 1959 was pretty informal. Most of the students worked part- or even full-time, and a lot were vets, but Charlie really looked like a bum. His dark brown hair was too long and seemed barely combed, but when he spoke to her in his deep friendly voice, Jaime felt something.

  “You read any of them books?”

  At just that moment they broke out into the open sunlight and for no reason at all, Jaime felt wonderful, no longer lonely.

  “You mean Moby Dick? Have I read Moby Dick?”

  “Yeah, and them others. Passenger to India? You read that?”

  Jaime stopped walking and turned toward him, holding her books up to her chest. He smiled down at her like a friendly old dog. She was about to correct him when she decided he was putting her on. Why this should thrill her she did not know. She laughed and they sat down on one of the concrete benches in the patio and shared her last cigarette. Their Clark class was the last class of the day for both of them on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. They began meeting before class, out on the patio. After a few weeks of sitting together talking Jaime realized that Charlie did not know her name. He called her “Babe,” but he probably called most women “Babe.”

  “My name is Jaime Froward,” she said one day just as they were walking into class. She spelled it for him.

  “That’s great,” he said. “I’m Charlie Monel.” He reached out and shook her hand warmly. She could not tell if he was putting her on or not. In class Charlie never volunteered, never spoke up, just sat, head bent, drawing pictures in his notebook. By midterm she had no idea whether he was paying attention or not. The midterm exam was a single essay question, the hardest kind of test. Jaime chose to write about Death Comes for the Archbishop, and filled three little blue books with her precise handwriting. She had sweated freely while writing, which was a good sign. When finished she turned to see Charlie bent over his blue book, scribbling, his face an inch from the paper, pencil clutched awkwardly in his hand. He seemed to be writing furiously. The bell rang. Jaime turned in her books and walked out of the class. Charlie and a couple of the others were still writing. She went out to the patio and sat down, lighting a Pell Mell, as she liked to call them, and waited. He came out nearly twenty minutes later, his face bland, hair all over the place. He grinned at her and sat down.

  “Got a smoke?”

  She handed him her pack. “What did you write on?” she asked.

  “Moldy Dick,” he said. “It’s mah favorite book.”

  When the midterms came back, Jaime was infuriated to find that she had gotten only a B+. Charlie had gotten an A and a whole column of comments from Clark, in his tiny blue pencil script. The only thing Clark had written on Jaime’s book was, “You have a nice appreciation of Cather.”

  “Can I read y
our paper?” she asked Charlie. She knew her face was red with anger. Back at Drew she had been the best literature student they ever had, or so they told her.

  They sat down on the bench and read each other’s midterms. Charlie’s was hard to read. His handwriting was messy, as if he had taught himself how to write. But once she caught on, she read his essay with fascination and some envy. Charlie’s style was exuberant and his ideas sharp, she decided. Although he was pretty crude. She finished while Charlie was still concentrating on hers. He moved his lips as he read, something she had always made fun of, but now realized wasn’t funny but touching, even charming. He stopped. “Yours is better,” he said. He smiled painfully.

  She felt a stab of pleasure. “Then how come you got the A and I got the B plus?” she asked, wishing she hadn’t.

  “Beats the shit outta me,” he said with a shrug.

  “Well, at least we didn’t flunk,” she said.

  “You wanna come over to my place?” he asked, looking right at her, for once not smiling. This was the moment she had been waiting for all semester. The pass, at last. She’d turn him down gently. After all, he had liked her midterm.

  “Well okay, sure,” she heard herself saying. “Where do you live?”

  2.

  Charlie lived in North Beach, on Genoa Place, between Union and Green, halfway up Telegraph Hill. The apartment was small, two rooms separated by a half wall, two big windows looking out over the alley. Still, it was a nice view, with each of the apartments across the street a different pastel color and plenty of bright blue sky when it wasn’t foggy. In late 1958 when Charlie moved in, the place had been a terrible mess. The former tenant had been an amphetamine dealer. The place smelled of stale Chinese cabbage and leaky plumbing. The little toilet was filthy and nobody had cleaned the walls or under the fixtures in years. The apartment was covered with tattered layers of old wallpaper, paint splatters, dried-on food, and other things Charlie couldn’t recognize. The story was that the amps dealer had committed suicide by taking barbiturates. He lay down on his smelly old mattress, expecting to die, but a couple of acquaintances from the Hot Dog Palace down on Columbus came knocking and, when he didn’t answer, broke in with a screwdriver. They hoped to find amphetamines but found the dealer instead, barely breathing. According to the story, they ransacked the place anyway and found the stash, outfit and all. They shot up right there, and as a humanitarian gesture, shot speed into the dealer’s arm. He woke up later to find his stash gone and a long explanatory note written on a paper bag.

  After getting rid of the dealer’s junk, Charlie washed the floor and walls, scraped and repainted the wooden floor, and removed the paint from the woodwork and the wallpaper from the plaster. He spent three days cleaning the stove and the little refrigerator. He stained the wood and whitewashed the plaster. The place began to look and smell wonderful. He bought a cot and mattress from the army surplus store on Stockton, kitchen things from Figone Hardware on Grant, unpacked his cardboard suitcase, unrolled his sleeping bag on the mattress, unpacked his books and put them up on orange crates, and was home. The amps dealer had finally succeeded in killing himself by going out to Land’s End after filling up on barbiturates, and sitting watching the ocean until he went out. When they found the body he had the phone number of the city morgue in his pocket.

  Charlie’s car was a 1940 De Soto sedan, pale gray and rusty, but a good old reliable car. He and Jaime spent the twenty-minute drive from State to North Beach talking about school. All very noncommittal. He parked on Union just above Grant. He wondered if he should run around the car and open the door for Jaime. She had been awfully quiet on the drive. Charlie didn’t try to hustle her with a lot of bright stuff, and now that they were in North Beach he wondered why he had brought her with him at all. She was damned good-looking, that was why. He smiled as innocently as he could and said, “Well, here we are.”

  “I think I better go home,” she said in a small voice.

  Charlie felt relieved. He didn’t want to seduce some poor damn nineteen-year-old girl if she didn’t want to be seduced.

  “Where do you live?” Charlie asked.

  “On Washington, near Fillmore,” she said. “I can take the bus.”

  “No,” he said. “We’re here now, come on in, have a cup of tea, and I’ll drive you on home.”

  She said nothing so he got out and came around to open the door for her. Their eyes met as she got out. Hers were very large and blue, the color of the sky. They regarded him evenly, intelligently, even speculatively.

  “Hi,” he said to the eyes.

  “Hi,” she said back to him. He kissed her lightly.

  “Come on, it’s just up the alley.”

  “I’ll leave my stuff in your car.” They walked side-by-side up the narrow slanting alley.

  She liked his apartment. She had expected—dreaded—a messy little place, but found herself in a monk’s cell. There were no pictures on the wall, no brave posters or photographs, only a wall of books. There was the cot, with a brown army blanket under the neatly zipped sleeping bag, and a bare table and old wooden kitchen chair, obviously where he wrote, with a cardboard box underneath filled with manuscript. On the divider between the rooms, there was an old tin alarm clock ticking away and a water glass with some fresh nasturtium leaves and flowers.

  “Oh, I love it,” she said. “How much?”

  “Forty-five a month,” he said. He went through the arch into the kitchen. “Do you want tea? I have Lipton’s or Japanese green tea.”

  “Lipton’s is fine.” There was no place to sit except at his little table. Or she could just undress and lie on the bed. He could come out and find her naked. Surprise! Actually, she had no intention of sleeping with him, at least not today. He didn’t seem like the kind of man who would just push her down and take her. She felt safe. She went over to the books.

  “You have great books,” she called to him.

  “Mostly junk from McDonald’s,” he said. “You know the place I’m talkin’ about? Down on Turk Street?”

  “In the Tenderloin?”

  He came out with the tea things, a brass teapot and two little Japanese terra cotta cups. “It’s the best used bookstore in town. They got thousands of books, and nobody down there knows the value of anything. Hemingway, fifty cents, Melville, fifty cents, Norman Vincent Peale, fifty cents. It’s all fifty cents to those guys.”

  They drank their tea and talked about books. Charlie had a little radio in the kitchen, and he turned it on. Cool jazz quietly filled the air and Jaime relaxed. As they talked she waited for him to make a move. She wondered if he was good at seducing girls. She hoped so, because she was shy. At least she thought of herself as shy. She felt a little shy right now. Waiting. Her own boyfriend, whose name was Bill Savor, no longer appealed to her. He was a boyfriend out of default. There were no similarities between Bill Savor and Charlie Monel. Bill was a student, but not in the Language Arts program, even though he wanted to be a writer. Instead he majored in Education, so he’d have a junior college teaching certificate to fall back on. If you had something to fall back on, you certainly would fall back. To hell with that. All or nothing. More like Charlie—or was she romanticizing Charlie?

  “Are you a romantic? Or a realist?” she asked him abruptly.

  “About what?”

  “My boyfriend’s a realist.”

  “If you have a boyfriend, maybe you better leave,” Charlie said, but he didn’t look as if he wanted her to leave. He’d just called her bluff, is all.

  “No, I mean, he’s a writer, but, you know, he doesn’t think there’s any money in it, so he’s studying to be a teacher.” Blah blah blah. Her face was reddening, she was certain. When was he going to make a pass? Never?

  “Why are you so worried about it?” he asked her. It was as if he had broken into her thoughts.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I ain’t going to make a pass at you,” he said. “If you like me then we can jus
t get undressed and go to bed. Nobody has to seduce anybody.”

  He grinned and sipped his tea. She grinned back, pressing her fingers together in her lap. “That’s how I feel too,” she said. “Well, I guess I better be getting home. I’ll take the bus, you’re all home and comfortable now.”

  “Naw, I’ll drive you.”

  “You don’t want to lose your parking space. I know how hard it is to park in North Beach. We come over here on weekends, you know. Driving around half the night looking for some place to park . . .”

  Charlie listened to her blathering and wondered why he didn’t just make a grab for her. But he didn’t. He stood up, took her hands into his, looked down into those big blue eyes and told her he would now drive her home. Did he see disappointment? He wasn’t sure.

  3.

  After North Beach, Jaime’s family home out on the lower lip of Pacific Heights seemed tame and middle-class, stifling. The house itself was beautiful. She loved the house. It was one of those carpenter Victorians with an ornate false front, angular bay windows showing a lot of white lace curtain, false Doric columns on either side of the little front porch at the top of a flight of false wooden steps. The house was painted a pale yellow, and all the trim, columns, and trellises on either side of the steps were painted white. Red roses grew up over the trellises, and western calla lilies crowded the border next to the house, behind a tiny ragged patch of lawn. The house was on a block of half-respectable two-story houses, some of them cut into small apartments, but all neatly kept-up behind a parking strip row of big leafy red flowering eucalyptus trees. Jaime had lived there all her life except the first year, when they lived out in the Sunset, which she didn’t remember. And for most of her life she had treacherously wished the family fortunes would improve enough for them to move north, up over the ridge, into Pacific Heights proper, where the really rich lived.

  But her father, her poor old drunken father, worked as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, and as Jaime grew up and began to understand life, she also began to understand that her family was never going to join the rich, no matter how much she and her mother wanted them to. Her father, it turned out, was the wrong kind of writer.