Fridays at Enrico's

by Don Carpenter

  Home was awkward without being tense. Cynthia took care of everything. Call girl or not, Cynthia was a fine au pair, and Kira loved her deeply. The two were always whispering together, leaving Charlie out of it. Which was fine. That wasn’t the problem. It was just that living in the house with an extremely good-looking young woman who was a prostitute on the side induced certain unworthy thoughts, which demanded of Charlie constant suppression. He wondered if Jaime had stuck him with Cynthia deliberately, to tempt him. In response to Linda, years ago. Whether she did or not, he wasn’t going to make any mistakes. If he made a pass at Cynthia she’d surely tell Tanya, who’d tell Jaime, and there you are. Not that Cynthia flirted, or walked around half-dressed, or anything like that. It seemed to Charlie that she was very careful not to. Which was also tremendously sexy.

  His life was insane, but calm. When Jaime finally decided what to do about her book, things would settle back to normal, except of course that Charlie had nothing to do. His long-time obsession was over. No point in starting another writing project. He was no writer. The thing was to find another obsession.

  49.

  Then Bill Ratto called, saying he’d finished reshaping Charlie’s manuscript. “I think we have a novel.” He seemed bright and brash over the telephone, but that’s how he always sounded. “We got you cheap at five grand,” he said with a bubbling laugh. He’d be coming to the West Coast to talk to writers and wanted to have dinner with Charlie and Jaime. Charlie hung up the telephone and rolled over on his back. It was seven in the morning, ten in New York. He’d not heard from Jaime in days. Now he called Bob Mills to share the news about Ratto’s call and the impending visit. He wanted to ask if Mills had word of either Jaime or her book, but found he couldn’t let Bob Mills learn he didn’t know where his own wife was.

  Listening to the sounds of Kira and Cynthia out in the house, Charlie got up and showered and dressed. His poor old war novel. The damnable stack of pages that was his oldest friend. Why was that, Charlie? Can’t you keep your human friends? Maybe the novel was done. Maybe Ratto had actually worked some kind of magic.

  Cynthia and Kira sat eating in front of the television set. Charlie got himself a mug of coffee and walked out into the garden. A linnet was singing its incredibly complex song. Charlie finally spotted the little bird at the highest point on his television antenna. Shouldn’t Charlie be doing the same thing? Crowing with all his might? He sipped at his coffee, hoping the caffeine would cut through his depression. He sat on one of the redwood lounge chairs, staring out at the misty bay, then felt wet seeping through his jeans. He stood, brushing at his wet seat, and went back into the house.

  Three days later Bill Ratto called again, this time from the Mark Hopkins. He was ensconced and receiving. Charlie’s anger at Jaime was growing. Not for being out of touch, but because with Bill here, frankly, Charlie needed the moral support. He’d geared up to dislike what Ratto had done with his stuff, but he hated arguing about writing, especially his own, and dreaded having to do it without Jaime at his side. She had the diplomatic gifts, unless she lost her temper. Charlie was blunt. Now, at last, his manhood was offended by her failure to be where he could find her. Especially since he refused to look. He’d begun avoiding even North Beach at night, confining his drinking to Sausalito and the no name bar. Even there, he half-expected to see Jaime come through the door.

  Charlie parked in the Standard garage up the block from the Mark and walked to the hotel with his hands jammed in his front pockets. At least the thing would be out on the table, no longer beyond his control in New York. He’d pick up the manuscript, carry it home, read it in leisure, and then call Bill Ratto. If Jaime happened to show up, he’d have her read it too. If not, then not. Charlie was a big boy. He could handle it all by himself.

  Ratto’s room was a tiny cube down a long dark corridor. Charlie had assumed the Mark Hopkins was a luxury hotel, but it didn’t look like one from the inside. Bill yelled “Come in!” and Charlie opened the door to find Bill on one of the twin beds, dressed in dark pants and a white shirt open at the throat. He was plump and round-faced, with a sharp little nose. He wore silver-rimmed glasses and had a small moustache. He had a manuscript in his hands and there others all over the room, as many as fifty of them, Charlie estimated, on the other bed, on the furniture, and on the rug.

  “Just the man I wanted to see,” he said, as if they hadn’t had an appointment. Charlie closed the door and took a couple of boxes of manuscript off one of the chairs and sat down.

  “Hello, Bill,” he said, trying to calmly set the tone for the meeting.

  “I want you to find me some pot,” Bill said. “I thought it would be easy, but the bellhops here don’t even seem to know what it is, and the writers I’ve been talking to either can’t get it or won’t. How about you?”

  “I can’t help you,” Charlie lied. “But I’ll ask around.”

  “Just a couple of joints. To remove the hotel flavor from my life.”

  “How’s it going?” Charlie said, not eagerly, but calmly.

  Bill sat up and put the manuscript down. “You ready to read a great book?” he said with a pursed smile. “Are you ready to die over a book?”

  “Yeah,” Charlie said, and grinned. He began to feel better. Bill rummaged around and came up with a big fat unrecognizable pile of pages, held together by thick rubber bands. “Is that mine?” he asked.

  Bill handed it to him. “I took the liberty of having it typed. It was a mess, you know.”

  Charlie hefted it. Couldn’t be more than five hundred pages. Out of at least fifteen hundred he’d sent in, all told. “How long you in town for?” he asked Bill. “I can read it and call you, or we can meet or something.”

  “Are you kidding?” Bill said. “I want you to read it here and now.”

  Charlie numbly sat down and began removing the rubber bands. He didn’t want to sit here and read it. He’d read just a little, say something nice, then take the fucker home. “Nice title,” he joked. The title was his own, The End of the War. The trouble wasn’t the title, everybody loved the title. He started reading the first paragraph. The telephone rang and Bill answered it, not lowering his voice at all, making an appointment with somebody. Charlie kept reading, his face going numb. There was a knock at the door and Bill jumped up, mumbled with somebody at the door, and came back in with another hefty manuscript, this one all done up in wrapping paper and string. Charlie read on, his heart freezing. He recognized hardly anything but the character names and a few four-letter words. The rest had been so screwed around that he had a feeling of lightheadedness, as if he was about to faint. He read on while Bill talked on the phone, waiting to see if all the dramatic rewriting came to an end, maybe after the first chapter. No. It went on and on, page after page of stuff he simply did not recognize and intensely did not like. Gradually he lost his temper. His novel had been turned into a pile of shit. He stopped reading, the manuscript on his knees. He breathed deeply, trying to get control over himself.

  “Well?” said Bill brightly. “How do you like it?”

  Charlie thought carefully. He had nothing against Ratto. Bill had been trying to help. He’d worked hard trying to turn Charlie’s manuscript into a publishable novel. Perhaps he had. It read smoothly enough. In fact, too smoothly. It had a nice slick tone. It might be pretty good commercial fiction now, instead of worthless words on paper.

  “Well?” Bill’s face was wide open for some praise.

  Charlie sighed. “Haah.” He carefully put the manuscript on the floor and stood up. “I can’t do it, Bill.” He grinned at the floor, embarrassed. “I’ll give back what I’ve been paid. Of the advance. I’m sorry.”

  The surprise on Bill Ratto’s face could not have been more complete.

  PART FOUR

  C Block

  50.

  Stan Winger’s cell was seven feet long, five feet wide, and nine feet high. It was in the middle of the third tier and fairly quiet. Stan had a few books, but n
o other personal possessions. He swept the cell every morning and made up his bunk. Once a week he washed all the surfaces in the cell and rubbed them dry with an old tee shirt. He liked it as clean as he could get it, but he was not a clean freak. The men in C Block didn’t go to jobs or eat in the big dining hall or leave their cells for any reason except hospitalization. They were better off than the men in the Rehabilitation Center who were in strip cells. In C Block you had a toilet, a bunk, and your clothes. You had a broom to sweep with, and all the personal junk you could cram in. But you couldn’t leave, except to exercise once a day for an hour, or to shower twice a week.

  C Block was for the inmates who needed, for one reason or another, to be off the main line. If a politician or a judge or a police officer was sent to prison he ended up here, among the snitches, the queens, the child molesters, and others, like Stan Winger, whose lives might be in danger. Stan was in here because the administration felt he would get into trouble on the main line for the creative arts program, which he had started.

  Up in Oregon State pen there had been an arts program, and Stan had done quite a bit of painting. He liked to paint. More than writing, painting got you out of there. You could fall into the brush strokes, disappear, or you could get so turned on by the act of painting that your whole body felt a rosy sexual glow. Painting was great, and Stan meant to do some painting during his nickel bit. He complained and agitated and acted like a complete jerk by demanding that the administration get on with the business of rehabilitation. There had been a little gift shop in the visitor’s center, but it had lapsed under changing conditions. The shop had sold hobby work made by the cons, the woodwork and metalwork, the rings and earrings made from toothbrush handles, etc., and Stan decided that the gift shop should open again, only now also showing prison art. Plenty of the men were talented. They could sell their stuff and become rehabilitated. So Stan argued.

  The program had been a big success. They had their first big art show, with the public invited, and a couple of newspapers and television stations gave them coverage. The show brought in several thousand dollars, although Stan himself sold nothing. But he was generally credited with bringing the money into the joint, and word spread that he was a pretty good guy. They began having regular shows, the gift shop was reopened, and Stan Winger developed a reputation not just as a good guy but a guy to know. A minor celebrity on the big yard.

  His fellow convicts reacted by trying to get him to use the art shows to smuggle goods into the place. The administration reacted by trying to turn him into a snitch. Eventually he ended up in C Block for his own good. The irony was that the fine arts program went on without him, and was spreading to other prisons. Another irony was that he gave up painting and instead devoted himself to finally getting published as a writer. It was cheaper to write than to paint. Stan liked to paint with fresh oils. He loved the smell of them, and liked to apply the paint with a long thin palette knife, and that was expensive. But he could read and he could write. The library queen came around with the book cart three days a week, and Stan began cutting out the blank pages that books had in the front or back, padding, he assumed, to make the books look bigger and thereby justify a higher price. Stan needed the paper to write on. He already had several pencils, each lifted as the opportunity arose.

  With paper being so scarce, Stan decided he’d do his composing in his mind, only transferring the words to paper when he was sure of them. He wasn’t just writing to pass the time. He had a plan. Fawcett Gold Medal Original Books. They were mysteries and suspense novels, usually hardboiled. An article in Writer’s Digest had informed Stan that Fawcett paid twenty-five hundred dollars for a Gold Medal Original. It had to be from fifty to seventy thousand words. And it had to be like all the other Gold Medal Originals, Stan assumed. He’d write one himself, and then this time, when he got out of the joint, there would be some money waiting for him. He wouldn’t have to turn right around and come back in.

  Stan had only been on the bricks a total of eight days between prison terms, and he was determined that this should not happen again. The eight days had been very exciting, and a lot of fun, looking back, but insane. He and the two guys he met on the bus leaving Oregon State Prison teamed up for a bunch of robberies in Oregon, Nevada, and finally California. They were arrested after a high-speed chase through the Sacramento Valley, Stan and his two friends escaping in a CHP car and finally wrecking it just outside Manteca. Stan was knocked around a little by the police, but one of the guys, Tommy Sisk, was shot in the head and died that night. So Stan was ready, more than ready, to become a productive member of society. He’d do this by writing fast-paced pulp paperback novels. Once he learned the trick, he reasoned, he could turn them out like Toll House cookies.

  It took him four months to write the first book. It was written in pencil on various sizes of paper in various conditions, a thick stash of messy-looking paper under his bunk. When the guards searched the cell they found it, of course, but they were kind-hearted and let him go on working. Technically, he had the right to write a book, but in actual fact he was at the mercy of the administration or any member of it, from the warden down to the lowest guard. But they kindly let him write his book, and for a while he was so deeply engrossed he actually forgot where he was and who. It all came back to him when he finished the thing and had to decide how to get it to the Fawcett Publishing Company in New York City. He was all but helpless. He had no way to get the thing typed, for one thing. Well, he’d skip the typing. He only chance was to con one of the guards, convince him that by smuggling this mess of paper out and mailing it to Fawcett, he’d be cutting himself into a lot of money. He picked the dumbest of the guards available and sang his song. It took a week, but the guy finally went for, promising to package and mail Stan’s manuscript to Fawcett in exchange for eight hundred dollars on the come. Now he had to hope the people at Fawcett would have the perception to read it.

  After two months of waiting, Stan finally realized that the guard had not mailed the manuscript at all, just dumped it somewhere. He even got the guy to admit it. “You’re a daydreamer,” the guard said in defense of himself. Stan lay on his bunk for three days. It was the worst thing prison had ever done to him. It had killed his hope. He swore revenge.

  51.

  There was no point in writing anything down. He no longer trusted anyone. Stan had a good imagination and a good memory. He’d work on both, improve both, and write his fucking book in his head. The best part was that they would think they’d beaten him. That was all they really wanted. And for the first time since he’d been jailing, Stan decided to get in shape. He had no muscles, and laying around jail had made him soft and weak. He couldn’t go out into the yard and pump iron, so he did what the militants did over in the Adjustment Center, he employed the techniques of “Dynamic Tension,” and pitted his body against itself.

  At first he could do only a few pushups. Of course the food was crap, but he decided to stop blaming the food, the administration, the world in general, and start thinking and working for himself. Push-ups, leg-ups, pulling the bars apart, pushing the bars together, grunting and groaning for at least two hours a day. He did not try to write in his head while he exercised. That was another part of his day, to be exhausted from exercise, and then to let his mind wander around in the outside world. Not just for the freedom, but to see details and try turning them into words. The first task Stan set for his literary imagination was to find the words to describe the thing that frightened him most when they brought him into Block C. Looking up at the five tiers of cells, he could see along each railing festoons of filthy matted human hair, like some insane bunting. It was that hair, not the noise or the dirtiness or the gloom or the cold, no, just those festoons of hair. Once every couple of weeks the inmates were issued buckets and mops and mopped out their cells onto the guardrail (or not, if they wanted to live in filth, fine), and this water always contained a few human hairs, along with other bits of stuff. Then the regular mop con
would come down the tier swishing his mop back and forth, taking all the dirty water from the cells and sweeping it over the side, the water dripping down but the hairs catching on all the other hairs left from years and years of mopping. This created the festoons. He wouldn’t have known to call them festoons, but for the guards, and it was a while before he found out where they got that name. It was from a limerick:

  There was an old whore from Azores

  Whose cunt was all covered with sores

  The dogs in the street

  Would not touch the green meat

  That hung in festoons from her drawers.

  The former chief of police on Stan’s left told him the limerick, and the old queen on his right told him festoons were festive decorations. “Like my testicles, darling.”

  Stan spent a long time trying to come up with a description of the hanging hair that didn’t use the word festoons, but finally had to give up. Hemingway was right, words should be right on the money. Charlie Monel had introduced him to Hemingway, asking him to read “The Killers” and tell him if he thought it was authentic. It seemed full of clichés to Stan until Charlie explained that Hemingway had been stolen from so much that everything he wrote seemed trite. “But he did it first,” Charlie had said. “Him and Dashiell Hammett.” Then he and Charlie had gone down to Cameron’s on SW Third, and Charlie had led him through the bookstore to a musty back room filled with stacks of old pulp magazines. They’d spent an hour choking on paper dust looking for old copies of Mercury Mysteries with stories by Dashiell Hammett, stories, Charlie pointed out, that had been published before Hemingway’s first book, some of them as early as 1923. These stories had the same clipped realistic prose that Charlie loved. Stan, lying in his cell, tried to remember the Hammett stories he’d read so long ago up in Portland, sitting around Charlie and Jaime’s on a rainy afternoon, everybody doing as they pleased, Jaime perhaps in the kitchen baking cookies, Kira running around squealing, Charlie stretched in front of the fireplace with his nose in a book, Stan doing the same. Maybe they’d be drinking beer, classical music or jazz might be playing, and the rain would hit the roof with a steady pleasant drumming sound. He tried to remember the smell of fresh beer in a glass, just as you tip the glass under your nose to drink the beer, the little bubbles popping in your nose, the sharp taste hitting your tongue.