Fridays at Enrico's

by Don Carpenter

  “You’re good, aren’t you?” she said. “I can tell from the way you type.”

  Somehow he believed her.

  15.

  His perfect bachelor pad was now too small. It was fine that she had experience with writers and knew how to keep quiet, but apart from that first time it bugged Dick to have her in the room while he tried to write. On the other hand, he hated it when she was gone. The dilemma could be solved only by moving. He got no work done for a month, while he and Linda honeymooned, took side trips around the northern part of the state, and looked for a place where they could live together. Linda wouldn’t tell Dick where she had been staying or who with, if anybody. “It’s not right,” was her only explanation. She wouldn’t let him drive her home, asking to be let off at the intersection of NW Twenty-First and Johnson, a shabby industrial neighborhood. Dick understood, just as he understood that Linda would never explain why she’d left exciting bop neon San Francisco for dull wet Portland. She’d come north with some guy, of course. And was living with the sap at NW Twenty-First. And was going to leave him for Dick Dubonet.

  Dick was never satisfied. Either the places they found were too expensive, too small, too big, or too far from downtown. Dick couldn’t see himself living east of the Willamette River, though prices were higher on the west side. Then they found a treasure. His friend Karl Metzenberg, who owned the Caffe Espresso, told him about a block of hillside houses that had been condemned for a freeway interchange, a big chunk of Old Portland being wiped out to allow north–south traffic to cruise through without stopping. But the project had been delayed, leaving a whole block available at unbelievably low prices.

  SW Cable Street had twelve houses on the hill side, each with long flights of wooden steps rising through old green-stained concrete retaining walls and lush overgrown gardens. The houses on the down side were all rented to artists. The hillside houses were harder to rent because of the steps. Dick and Linda had their choice at forty-five dollars a month. The landlord was a bank and didn’t care. Eventually all the houses would be torn down. It was perfect. They took the house at 33 Cable, big living room, big kitchen and dining room, two bedrooms. For his office Dick took the front bedroom overlooking Cable Street, with a view on good days of Mount Hood, sixty miles east.

  They spent a week buying things at St. Vincent and the Goodwill. Dick calculated that the move and the addition of Linda was going to cost him dearly, running his nut up to two hundred dollars a month. Good luck that among the traits they shared was the trait of thrift. She was as careful as he was. They found bargains to cackle over and take home, so though Dick spent money like water he worried about it only in the early morning, when he’d wake up in a cold sweat. She was so beautiful it made him paranoid. What did she want with him? Could it really be love? Or was she being clever? She still thought of him as the kind of writer who could command huge sums from magazines. She didn’t know the truth. Had the money attracted her? She could be pretending to go along with his cheapness to lull him into security. Then, when he can’t live without her, she becomes a spendthrift. He hated such thoughts, but early in the mornings, when he was wide awake and she slept, they came to him. For the ten thousandth time he concluded he had an inferiority complex. She was attracted to him because he was a success, yes, but also for other qualities. Handsome. He had to admit that. Nice car. Money. Talent. Although he was not quite sure about the talent. He hoped he had talent. If he didn’t, he’d make up for the lack by working hard. Another good talent. No wonder she fell for him. What a prince. He knew why he’d fallen for her. She was too good for him. Too beautiful, too attractive to other men. More inferiority complex. When he walked into a tavern or party with Linda it made him glow with conceit. As if he needed her to prove what a hot guy he was. The sale to Playboy had done a lot for his ego, but Linda had done more.

  The writing suffered for a month, but he had fourteen stories in circulation. Fortunately for his sanity, Linda found a job as a secretary downtown, and was gone all day. Thank god. But it wasn’t until she handed him her first paycheck, eighty-seven fifty-eight after deductions, that he began to believe that she really did love him. And he needed the assurance, because Linda was having trouble liking what he wrote.

  First he laughed. “You’re not supposed to like it.” She’d been less than wildly enthusiastic about his new story, which he hadn’t sent to anybody yet. “It’s for men. It’s a man’s story.”

  “I like it,” she lied, making it clear by her innocent expression that she was lying. “Have you read ‘October in the Railroad Earth’?” And there it was, the inevitable comparison. The odious comparison. “Yeah,” he said. “I admit I’m no Kerouac,” he added gruffly.

  “Oh, I wasn’t—”

  “Sure you weren’t.” His feelings weren’t hurt long. He was used to people complimenting him on a story and then taking it back with a cutting remark. A lot of people secretly wanted to be writers, and they were jealous. He was used to people saying, “I read your story,” and then waiting for him to ask them how they liked it. Falling into the trap. So they could say, “Oh, it was okay,” or some other critical remark. He hoped he would not react every time Linda snubbed his work, and told himself it shouldn’t matter that she didn’t gushingly love every word he wrote. But it did. He told himself that if she loved his work after a while he probably would have grown tired of her. This way, there was a constant excitement, a constant need for him to improve. She would be his goad, his shining ideal.

  They gave a party when the Playboy story appeared. It was the lead, as promised, and had a wonderful illustration. There was a picture of Dick in the front of the magazine with the other contributors, and Dick entertained everyone telling them about the photo session, which had lasted three hours for a tiny little head shot. Everybody on the block was invited, and Dick’s friends from Portland State and Reed. Painters, sculptors, musicians, lots of musicians with their guitars and banjos, a few would-be writers, some teachers and social workers, and after the party got going everybody who was not playing an instrument got up and danced, the new Portland-style dance, where you put your hands on your hips and kicked up high. It was a great party, and people talked about it for months. Portland finally had a group.

  16.

  Stan Winger started writing down his various thoughts and ideas in the Multnomah County jail up at Rocky Butte. There was nothing to do anyway but sit on the benches and play cards, and Stan was broke and looking at sixty days. At first it seemed stupid, just scrawling down whatever he felt like writing, but Marty Greenberg had been very enthusiastic about Stan’s brain and had talked about intellectual freedom and the power of ideas. Of course they had both been full of coffee, sitting around half the night at Jolly Joan’s on Broadway. Jolly Joan’s was open all night, a big room full of night people and insomniacs, one of Stan’s regular hangouts when he was on the bricks. The regulars pretty much all knew each other, at least by sight, and Stan and Marty had got to talking one night until 4:00 a.m. sitting next to one each other at the long counter. There were only a few people in the place at the time, and Marty was flirting with the waitress in her pink and white uniform.

  “Let me take you away from here,” he kidded.

  “I’ll bring your order, then we can fly to Mexico,” she said. She was plump and cute. Stan could never have kidded her easily like that. It was a quality he admired. He’d seen Marty a few times, and figured him for one of those intellectuals, which turned out to be true.

  “You’re buying the tickets,” Marty said, and winked at Stan.

  Stan smiled and picked up his coffee to cover his shyness. He wished he had the gift of talking to people. Fortunately for him, Marty Greenberg had the gift, and opened Stan up like a can of peas. Over a month or so they became buddies, at least late-night buddies, and Stan went into JJ’s now hoping to run into Marty for one of their deep conversations. Stan had never realized how bottled up he was.

  “You’re a shy man, you don�
��t like to talk about things,” Marty told him. “So you should become a writer.”

  “I can’t write,” Stan said. “I didn’t even graduate from high school.”

  “All the better,” Marty said, and they started talking about the educational system and how fucked up it was. It was Stan’s opinion that what had happened to American education was that the students had learned to beat the system. “It used to be if you fucked up you were punished, but kids finally learned that the teachers were scared of the kids, and scared to punish them. You know, ‘Flunk me and die.’”

  “You’re a fairly clear thinker,” Marty told him another time. Was Marty a student? Stan wasn’t sure. Stan didn’t tell Marty he was a thief.

  Writing down his thoughts was hard at first. Though his mind was bursting with ideas, when he actually sat down on the narrow wooden bench in the dayroom, men all around him playing cards or dominoes, and opened the stenographer’s pad he had hustled, just seeing that blank page of little blue lines emptied his brain. He sat clicking his ballpoint pen until somebody said, “Hey, asshole, what the fuck you doin’?” Embarrassed, he bent forward and started writing. He couldn’t think of anything else, so he wrote about the room. It was something to do. He did not get along easily with other men, in jail or out, and he was far too shy to get along with women. The great thing about being a thief was that it didn’t take up all that much of your time. The bad thing was that you had a lot of time on your hands. Especially if the stealing wasn’t going that well, which was often. Stan had never made a really big score. Actually, he wasn’t much of a thief. He really didn’t have any control over himself, that was all, and when he would go a little crazy he would do the stealing. It was like an aura coming over him, a light feeling, an empty feeling, but not unpleasant. His mind would just get silly, and he’d feel as if no one could stop him. Nothing was real. He’d be walking down a street and see a house and know that it was empty and he could penetrate. By this time he’d be really excited, still feeling invulnerable, and he’d find himself walking around to the back, as if he owned the place, casual, just this small ordinary-looking guy, walking up to the kitchen door or down the outdoor staircase or lifting open the window and slipping inside, that exact moment of penetration giving him a feeling he could not describe, taking over the entire center of his body, so intense sometimes that he had to stop halfway and get control over himself.

  Then inside, in the silence of the house, the good feeling would take over. He was powerful and in control. The house was his. Once he was sure he was alone, he would just walk through the silence, enjoying the way every house was different inside. He usually broke into homes that were well kept up. They were the ones that made him feel good. There was something incredibly intimate about being in somebody’s house, as if he and the people of the house were very close. And yet he would do these things. Things having nothing to do with making a living. Things he didn’t like to think about. Most of the time he was neat and careful, just going to the places where he knew people kept their valuables. But then, their jewelry or cash in his pockets, an even stranger feeling would overtake him. He might find himself pissing on the bed or into bureau drawers full of women’s underthings. What the hell was that all about? Often he would take a crap on the dining room table, or somewhere else just as bad. Or sit down and have a meal out of the refrigerator, with this intense sexual feeling passing through him, making him brave beyond sanity. When, in fact, he was a complete coward.

  He read over what he’d written. He was disgusted by it. Real bad. Pointless clumsy shit. But when the deputies took his notebook from him, he realized the power of the writing. There’d been nothing in those few pages to bother anybody, just descriptions of things and people, lousy descriptions at that, and the guards had to tear it up. To show their power. But what they showed him was their lack of power.

  Another guy might have grinned at the deputy and said something like, “Go ahead. It’s all right here,” and tap his head. Hinting at an exposé. But of course Stan Winger was not that type of guy. He just bent over and picked up the pieces from where the deputy had dropped them, and moved along.

  He lived on SW Fourth Street at the Mark Hotel, where his room cost him seven dollars a week. He did all his stealing in the daytime, and suffered insomnia at night, so the writing was good for him. Under his bed were stacks of paperbacks and pulps, which used to be his only form of home entertainment. Now he could sit on the bed with his notebook on his lap and write. His dream was to develop his writing skills to the point where he could make a living at it. He’d write the kind of stories he liked, pulp, only without all the bullshit he hated. He didn’t take himself all that seriously, but after a while he found he was writing every night. He’d long since stopped writing mere impressions, and had moved onto actual stories by the time he showed any of his work to Marty Greenberg.

  “You wrote this?” They were at Jolly Joan’s, it was about four in the morning and snowing hard against the big front windows. Marty’s face was lit up as he read through the notebook, stopping once in a while to laugh or consider Stan with amazement. “This stuff is great!” he said finally, slapping the notebook shut and handing it back to Stan.

  “Gee,” was all he could say.

  “No,” Marty said, waving his hand. “Not really great, but great for what you’re doing. I’ve never read any detective stories, but you seem to have a real grasp of the medium.”

  By this time Marty knew he was a thief. As Stan had imagined, the knowledge made Marty even more interested in him.

  “You know what you ought to do? You ought to write about stealing. From the inside. That could be a real contribution.”

  Stan had not been thinking about a contribution. The idea of writing about stealing terrified him. “You want me put away?” he joked, and Marty laughed.

  “I want you to do your best.”

  17.

  Marty took Stan Winger for coffee at Karl Metzenberg’s Caffe Espresso one rainy night, explaining that the place was the hangout of a lot of Portland’s artists and writers. “Many are girls,” Marty pointed out as they walked up the hill from Jolly Joan’s. Stan envied Marty’s way with girls. At twenty-four he’d never dated or kissed a girl. He’d been robbing houses since he was thirteen. No time for girls. You could put it that way. One reason he’d dropped out was that the only reason for going to school was meeting girls, and none of the girls at Parkrose Junior High or David Douglas High were interested enough to speak to him. And of course he couldn’t speak to them first. The words wouldn’t come. This is part of what drove him to a life of crime. He needed money, and as a foster kid he never had any. With money he could buy love.

  Now, coming in through the tall white double doors of the Caffe Espresso, he felt on the edge of a new adventure. He’d never been taken seriously before, except as a thief, and then only by the cops. But Marty Greenberg took him seriously as a beginning writer and seemed to like him as a person. The place was about half full, a middle-sized room with two high wooden ceiling fans lazily moving smoke around. Marty introduced Stan to Metzenberg, a chunky young guy wearing a dress shirt, bow tie, and a big white apron, bowed and scraped like a maître d’ in a movie, but with an ironic grin that meant he was half-kidding. Metzenberg escorted them to a table in the back corner. All the tables had white tablecloths. Marty ordered espressos. Stan had never had one, but was willing to try. Some of the girls in the room were pretty terrific looking, college girls or graduate students, according to Marty.

  “Stan’s a writer,” Marty said to Metzenberg, just loud enough to be heard by the two girls at the next table.

  “Dick Dubonet just left,” Metzenberg said. The girls at the next table were really paying attention now. Stan knew who Dick Dubonet was, though until Marty told him, Stan hadn’t realized that in a city the size of Portland there would be published writers.

  The guy wrote for Playboy. One of Stan’s favorite magazines, although he suspected they airbrushed
their nudes. But he didn’t much like the stories. They seemed soft to him, too much about romance, an element lacking in Stan’s life. He much preferred stories that had more at stake, life and death. Sometimes Playboy had stories like that, but not often enough. He wondered which kind Dick Dubonet wrote. But he didn’t ask. He didn’t know how to phrase his question. He wouldn’t ask Marty, not in this intellectual stronghold. Stan never felt anxious about robbing houses until afterward, but the prospect of girls put a cold hand on his chest.

  Marty was already talking to the girls at the table. Stan tried to look keen instead of nervous. Both girls had taken glancing looks at him, and as far as he could tell had looked away without interest. If Marty actually did pick them up, he’d have to take care of them himself. Stan had already decided he wasn’t going to make any passes tonight. He was just too tense.

  But the girls got up and left. Stan felt better immediately, but he also felt a little disappointed. The day was going to have to come when he slept with a girl he hadn’t paid for. He thought about getting a whore tonight. Not as easy as it used to be, not in Portland. When Stan first started visiting whorehouses there had been several downtown, all protected by the cops, in upstairs hotels over businesses. The price had been five dollars short and sweet or ten dollars long and sweet, easily worth the money as far as Stan was concerned. Then Portland had elected a woman mayor, Dorothy McCullough Lee, and after taking office the first thing she did was call the head of the local mob, Francis Feeney, and tell him she knew the address of every whorehouse in Portland and wanted them closed that night. They were closed that night. Stan was forced to go north, to Vancouver, Washington, just across the Columbia River, to get laid. That was okay, because Vancouver had a couple of pretty good card clubs and Stan loved to play cards. In fact, he sometimes told people he made his living as a gambler. Ha ha. But people would believe it was a romantic way to earn a living. He’d explained this to Marty, who assured him he wouldn’t tell anybody he was a thief, instead stick to the story that he was a gambling man.