Fridays at Enrico's

by Don Carpenter

  “Clearly, you’re rolling in money.” Marty seemed impressed.

  “Jaime is.”

  “What about your book?” Marty asked. “I know it’s a cruel question.”

  “Not cruel at all.” Charlie told them that Jaime’s editor had asked about his book and had looked at a couple hundred pages, hadn’t had much enthusiasm for them but had passed them to a younger editor, Bill Ratto. Ratto had gone mad over the pages, flown west to read “absolutely everything” Charlie had written, spent a frantic three days in San Francisco, never leaving his hotel room, being visited by dozens of writers, boxes and sheaves of manuscript all over his room. Ratto had seen a lot of potential in Charlie’s stuff. “You could have another Catch-22 in here, or Thin Red Line,” he said, sitting on his bed with Charlie’s pages all around him. Ratto was a white-faced New Yorker whose Harvard accent slipped into New York Jewish. Ratto was not a Harvard man or a New York Jew, however. He was from Denver, but he was a committed editor. “We shall blow the lid off American Literature!” he told Charlie. Of course they were smoking marijuana at the time.

  So Harcourt bought Charlie’s novel for a five-thousand-dollar advance, and Bill Ratto assured him over the telephone, “Just send the whole manuscript to me. Let me put it together. You just sit out there in California and write your next book.” Visions of Maxwell Perkins slaving over manuscripts. The famous editor who saved Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and more lately, James Jones. Charlie wasn’t so sure all those great writers actually needed saving. “He cut From Here to Eternity in half,” Ratto said with great enthusiasm on one of the hour-long phone conversations.

  “I’d like to see the half he cut.”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll make you a star,” Ratto said. He’d been fooling with Charlie’s manuscript for a year and a half, and they weren’t even close to a book. Bill kept wanting more material. When Charlie forced himself to write it and send it in, Bill wouldn’t be happy with it. “I don’t know,” he’d say, never exact as to what he didn’t like. “I’m no writer,” he’d say, if Charlie insisted on specific information.

  “So you’re just sitting around waiting,” Marty said.

  Charlie had to laugh. “I like sitting around.”

  “You’ve gained weight.” Marty poked Charlie gently where his stomach bulged out above his jeans. Marty was fine. He wasn’t back with Alexandra Plotkin, but he was relatively happy. “She’s working at David’s Delicatessen in San Francisco,” Marty said. “She won’t even give me free food.”

  “I have to go,” Kenny Goss said. Practically the only thing he said. They were on their way to the city, where Kenny kept a room. A change of clothes, then out on the town.

  “Wanna come along?” Marty said. “North Beach, liquor, women, magic . . .”

  Jaime was in North Beach. She’d been there four days, staying in their Genoa Place apartment. She wrote eight hours a day and had no time for Charlie or Kira, who was in Mill Valley with her au pair. Did he want to go to North Beach and risk running into Jaime?

  “Yeah,” he said, scratching his beard. “I’d love to.”

  “Why don’t you meet us at City Lights at around nine?” Marty said. “Bring Jaime.”

  42.

  Their Mill Valley house was on a cul-de-sac off Panoramic, high up on Mount Tamalpais, surrounded on three sides by redwoods and eucalyptus. On the other side a low hedge allowed a view of the bay almost as good as the view from the Sausalito waterfront. The place had cost them thirty thousand dollars, though it was only a little ranch-style house with three bedrooms and a bath and a half. Randy Wilde sold it to them. Randy was a waiter at the Trident restaurant in Sausalito who was dabbling in Marin County real estate. A big handsome Englishman, Randy was also an actor and a writer, and had played cricket for the Queen. Like all the English Charlie had met in the United States, Randy was eccentric. Real estate salesmen in Marin wore coats and ties, but Randy ran around in cutoff jeans and Hawaiian shirts, showing off his biceps and muscular legs.

  Jaime had wanted to pay cash for the house, that literary money burning a hole in her pocket, but Randy laughed and said, “That would be a mistake.”

  “Isn’t cash any good?” Jaime asked. They sat on the deck of the Trident, watching the boats on the bay.

  “Tax matters,” Charlie said, and Randy nodded. Jaime was hopeless about money, now that she had a lot of it. She’d even wanted her advance money to come in all at once, until Charlie explained about taxes. So she limited the amount she could get from sales of Washington Street to fifteen thousand dollars a year. But she also had the thirty thousand from Paramount, and at least twenty-five thousand from foreign sales. The money did not take Charlie’s breath away. It was heady at first, to know you weren’t going to have to worry about money for a while, unlike most of the human race, and Charlie didn’t have any problems with guilt. This money wasn’t the blood of the poor, in any way he could see. But he was careful to keep their bank accounts separate.

  Driving home Charlie thought again about stopping in at the salmon dock and buying a fish, but decided against it. A hundred to one that Jaime wouldn’t be home for dinner. She hadn’t been home for days. He didn’t want to cook salmon just for himself, the au pair and Kira, although Kira loved salmon. He still drove his golden green Volkswagen, but Jaime had picked up a 1961 Porsche in perfect condition for twenty-three hundred dollars. Charlie puttered up along the mountain ridge to Echo, their little cu-de-sac. He parked on the gravel drive and went into the house, holding down his disappointment at not seeing the Porsche. Kira was starting school in a few days. He wanted Jaime home for that. It was more important than writing.

  Charlie had been raised by his father and grandfather, and neither of them had been very good at it. He’d grown up thinking his mother was dead. That’s what he’d been told by his idealistic liar of a father. Died in childbirth, wonderful woman, would have made a great mother, etc. Charlie finally found out that his mother had dumped him and run. She was probably still alive somewhere. Charlie had an image of her, a big fat blonde with a happy laugh and missing teeth. He had sympathy for her. He wouldn’t have stayed with his father either, given a choice. Not that his father was a bad man, just incompetent. He worked in a lumber yard as a salesman and would never be anything else. His whole life was devoted to his belief that it was still possible in America to have your own piece of land, live on it, grow everything you needed, and shut out the world. His father’s version of true freedom.

  Charlie wasn’t so sure. He saw his father spend his life sitting at the kitchen table with a yellow scratch pad, trying to figure his way into freedom. Any money he saved would eventually end up spent on foolishness, as the old man would realize that at five dollars a week it would take forever to get the kind of property he needed. The realization made him brood and drink. He never hit Charlie except to cuff him now and again, but he was terrible on himself, and once in a drunken rage cut himself badly with the breadknife, dramatically demonstrating how he would cut his throat. God damn it, if things got any worse, and waved the knife and ripped a cut in the side of his neck that sent a big spurt of blood halfway across their tiny kitchen. “Let me die!” the old man cried as they carried him down the stairs to the ambulance.

  Kira and Cynthia sat in the living room watching television. The au pair wasn’t the usual girl from Europe. Cynthia was from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, a tall thin girl with long straight blonde hair and a long straight nose, cold blue eyes, and a murmuring way of speaking that irritated Charlie. Jaime found Cynthia and Jaime paid her.

  “How’s my girl today?” Charlie said to Kira, who came over and hugged his legs, then went back to sitting in front of the television. They watched Popeye cartoons. His daughter was so beautiful he wanted to die. That was how she made him feel sometimes. That to live would be to watch her beauty diminished by the realities of life. Other times, more realistic times, he saw she was a tough little cookie, like her mother.

  “Are
you going out tonight?” Cynthia asked him.

  “Yeah. You?”

  “I have to go out for a while, but Debbie’s coming.” Cynthia brushed back her hair and smiled up at Charlie. Debbie was the babysitter, as opposed to the au pair. Both, Charlie knew, were call girls. They never spoke of it, but Jaime had gotten them from her friend Tanya Devereaux, a notorious San Francisco madam. Charlie had known her in North Beach years earlier, when her place of business had been on Upper Grant. Now she was out on Twin Peaks, running a call house. Jaime had met her at a cocktail party and now they were fast friends. The ever-deepening mystery of women. Charlie didn’t pry. Charlie didn’t make a fuss. Cynthia was a damned good au pair, Kira loved her, she was neat and clean and quiet, and she was a talented girl who wanted eventually to be a commercial artist. She and Kira spent hours drawing together, sprawled on the living room rug, a nice thick peach-colored rug that Charlie very much enjoyed walking on. In fact, he enjoyed having money quite a lot. He only wished it had come in the traditional way, through the husband. But times were changing. He didn’t mind. Times had been shitty.

  For the first time since getting out of the military Charlie had a closet full of clothes to pick from. He chose jeans, white tee, green cashmere sweater, a present from his rich wife, and his hacking jacket, also a present from his wealthy famous wife. His new brown boots were Justins, good thirty-dollar boots, a present from himself. Fully washed, dressed, and looking at himself in the mirror, Charlie had a moment of real pleasure. Not at his reflection, displaying a thirty-five-year-old man with too much belly, but at the sight of a rich man. He only hoped it wouldn’t kill him.

  43.

  North Beach had changed. You could drive around lower Telegraph and Columbus for hours without finding a place to park. Jaime rented a garage on Union. But there was room for only one car. Charlie parked near Chestnut and walked toward City Lights. He was twenty minutes early, so he stopped in at Gino and Carlo’s for a beer. The place was empty except for three longshoremen playing pool. Charlie sat at the end of the bar next to the pool table and watched. Aldino bought him a bottle of Miller’s. He poured the beer into his pilsner glass slowly, wondering how many bottles of beer he’d drunk in his life. A lot. He wondered why a really great beer like Blitz-Weinhard wasn’t sold outside Oregon. He hadn’t tasted any of that creamy Blitz in years. Maybe he’d go into the beer business, import Blitz-Weinhard into California, make a fortune. Charlie Monel the Beer King. Fat Charlie the Beer Boy. Barley Charlie the Beer Queer.

  A couple of house painters, Stuart and Bob, came into the bar in their paint-stained white overalls and white caps, said hello to Charlie, and sat at the table next to the pinball machines. This was a comfortable bar, but a strange bar. It opened at six for longshoremen on their way to work, then around midmorning the place was held by Italian men, usually wearing blue suits and gray hats, smoking poisonous little twisted Italian cigars. At three thirty in the afternoon the longshoremen started filing in again, and by six the place would be full of Italians, longshoremen, and one or two local women. Then came a lull, such as right now, when the Italians and the working men went home for dinner. Then, Charlie knew, the poets would start coming in.

  Poets drank at Vesuvio and across Columbus at Twelve Adler Place and Tosca, but the only real poet’s bar was Gino and Carlo’s. Charlie and Jaime rarely came in before midnight, when things were just getting started. They’d seen Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Whalen, Spicer, Snyder, Welch, and Brautigan, all drinking and laughing and encouraging Spicer as he endlessly tried to beat the pinball machine. The poets had great minds and a lot of courage, and they drank like animals.

  Charlie finished his beer. Did he want another beer? He’d hoped to see Jaime in here. She’d sometimes come in at this hour to get some dinner at the USA Café or the Caffe Sport, and might stop in at G and C’s for a drink or two. Jaime always got up in the morning and wrote, no matter how bad her hangover. He thought about trudging up the hill to the apartment. She might be asleep. She wouldn’t work this late at night. Far more likely she was out somewhere, at a cocktail party, a book party, a dinner party, or just dinner and drinking with friends. She had a lot of friends who weren’t Charlie’s. Charlie had decided long ago not to attach himself to his wife’s coattails, and seldom went to the literary events she seemed to like so much. Why shouldn’t she? Everyone fawned, kissed her ass. Which she took as her due. Which it was.

  Shig Murao worked the bookstore’s tiny counter and hailed Charlie as he came in. “Your friends are downstairs,” he said.

  “Thanks.” Charlie went down the narrow stair to the basement. Marty and Kenny sat at a table near the avant garde–poetry magazine rack. There were a few other people in the basement, a convenient place to hang out if you lacked money. They’d let you sit around all day reading. Not even a clerk down here. You could stuff all the magazines and paperbacks your wanted down your pants and walk past Shig, no one the wiser. Apparently nobody did that, or not enough to make Ferlinghetti change the policy.

  They went next door to Vesuvio, which was already crowded and noisy. Jaime wasn’t there. At a table in the middle of the room they got down to some serious drinking.

  “I’ll have a lemon-orange,” Charlie decided. Lemon Hart 151-proof rum and orange juice. No reason not to get entirely drunk. At worst, he’d have the Telegraph Hill apartment to sleep in, should he find himself too drunk to drive. It was one of the reasons they rented the place.

  “Where’s Jaime?” Marty said at last, when they were drinking their drinks.

  “I have no idea.” He smiled to show it didn’t matter. “She’s just finishing her second book. Keeps her busy.”

  “Who are you talking about?” Kenny asked. He drank a glass of beer.

  “Jaime Froward,” Marty said. “Washington Street?”

  “Jaime Froward is your wife?” Kenny asked.

  “Yes, I am Mr. Jaime Froward,” Charlie said modestly.

  Kenny smiled for the first time that night. “She’s good,” he said.

  “Thank you,” Charlie said modestly.

  “Kenny is a rare book scout,” Marty said. “When he’s not sucking sand.”

  “What do you guys do on board when you’re not working?”

  “We read,” Marty said. “The ship’s library is extensive. There are, I believe, six Max Brand novels, paperbacks of course, and two Rex Stout mysteries.”

  “We take books out,” Kenny explained, as if Charlie might misunderstand. A literal, serious person, Charlie remembered.

  “You scout books?”

  Kenny explained the difference between good books and valuable books. “Value has only a slight relationship to quality,” he said, with a quick grin. “You know what I mean.”

  “Yeah,” said Charlie. To Marty he said, “Have you heard anything from the old gang in Portland?”

  Marty shook his head. “What about Linda?” he asked Charlie.

  Charlie shook his head. “She’s probably in the South Seas. What about Stan Winger? Anybody ever heard from Stan? He just vanished one day. Jaime thinks he’s in prison somewhere.”

  “That’s probably true,” Marty said. He told Kenny about Stan Winger, the young criminal who wanted to write pulp stories. Charlie pictured Stan sitting alone in a cell. No reason not to believe it was true. He thought about trying to write to him, cheer him up. It was none of his business.

  They had one more round at Vesuvio’s, then walked across to Twelve Adler Place, a tiny bar that had been a lesbian haunt for years, but was now just a bar. Charlie had gone in for the first time in the mid-fifties. He’d been drinking with somebody and talking about women when the guy said, “You wanna see a bar that’s all women, from one end to the other? Right around the corner!” and brought him in. You knew at once that these women weren’t waiting for two men to walk through the door.

  Tonight the place was empty. Jaime wasn’t there, and Charlie wanted to turn and walk out. Instead they sat and ordered drinks, anot
her Lemon Hart for Charlie, and talked about James Joyce. Kenny was reading Ulysses for the third time and thought it was the greatest novel in the English language. Marty had read only parts of it and felt it was bizarre, an Irishman trying to write about a Jew from the inside. “It’s just not possible,” he maintained. Charlie had read the book and enjoyed what he could understand. He thought about the incredible life of James Joyce. The blindness. The pain. The exile. The suffering.

  “James Joyce is dead,” he said finally, and hot tears ran down his cheeks.

  44.

  Through the mist he saw some guy at the bar, not a familiar face, grinning at Charlie’s tears. Without wiping his face Charlie got up and went over. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to burst into tears.” The man had a broad red homely face. Charlie hoped the guy would stand up and give him some shit, but all he did was hold out a hand.

  “Sorry,” he said. They shook. The guy had a good handshake. Charlie went back and sat down, frustrated but pleased with humanity. “Not a bad guy,” he said to Marty and Kenny. They’d begun discussing Hobbes, whom Charlie had only heard about. Apparently Hobbes thought mankind was just a bunch of animals, and Marty disagreed.

  “Do you believe in the supernatural?” Kenny asked. Charlie wondered what nights were like in the forecastle of the Breckenridge.

  “You mean above the natural? More than natural? Of course I do.” Marty gestured at the crowd around them. “You can’t possibly believe this is all there is. I’d kill myself if I thought that.”

  “I used to believe in God,” Kenny said.

  “I don’t believe in God exactly,” Marty said. “But I certainly believe in some kind of agency of creation. And some kind of power beyond human power.”

  “That’s because you’re a Jew,” Kenny said.

  “No,” Marty said. “Being a Jew doesn’t mean you have to believe in God. You just have to try.” He laughed. “So I try. But it’s easier to believe in man.” He turned his large serious eyes on Charlie. “It’s all between us, as humans.”