Fridays at Enrico's

by Don Carpenter

  Charlie and Jaime had been nice to him for no reason. There actually were such people in the world. Stan had to hang onto that, otherwise there would be no reason to write, to get out of here, to change his life. But they were out there. It was possible to live decently. The whole point of his revenge was to become an ordinary citizen, something the system did not expect and frankly probably didn’t believe could happen. Well, fuck the system.

  Even this honorable wrath died down after a while. It wasn’t personal, they didn’t want to hurt him, destroy his life. They did only what their limited imaginations allowed them. Stan, having more imagination, should rise above them, not go to war. Do his time. Write his novel in his head. Become the Buddhist angel of Kerouac’s dream.

  The novel, he decided, wouldn’t have the same story or characters as the one he’d lost through his stupidity. He’d write a brand-new story, with a cop as the hero. Only this cop would also be a thief, a murderer, and finally, a dead man. He even had a great-sounding title, one that, in his estimation, would sell books. Felony Fuzz. It rang like a bell, and for a long time he lay on his bunk, pronouncing the title over and over in his mind, experiencing the joys of creation, the pleasures of the poet.

  At other times he lost his sense of revenge and purpose and fell into despair. Reviewing his life, as he was compelled to do in this mood, he saw clearly that the fault was not his. He’d been given no chance. He’d not been given two good parents to raise him, in a house full of love, religion, school, happiness. He’d not even been given one parent who loved him enough to keep him. Instead, he’d been given professional parents, in it for the money. He couldn’t blame them, sad stupid people incapable of love or tenderness. Not their fault, but not Stan’s either. All he had to look forward to was an institutional life. He’d go from one facility to another, with days or hours of freedom in between, and finally he would die and be given one of those big government funerals you hear so much about, where they shovel you into a common grave. At times like this he could hardly breathe, much less write and memorize what he had written.

  52.

  They’d gone crayfish hunting, Charlie and Dick Dubonet and Marty Greenberg and himself, just the boys, you know, out for a day of sport. He tried to remember the name of the river, but couldn’t. A little river, not like the Willamette or the Columbia, just a stream, really, fast-running in the middle, rocks sticking up out of the water and a lot of greenish yellow stuff growing in the shallows. That was where you caught the crayfish. Dick called them crawdads. The whole trip had been his idea. They’d been at one of those guitar and banjo parties, and Dick had been talking about the world falling apart, atomic bombs, crazy governments, it was time people learned how to hunt and gather. Ending up with the four of them out on the banks, drinking beer and waiting for the crawfish to crawl into their traps.

  He tried to remember the traps. Like basketball hoops, he decided, big metal round rings with netting across the opening and a dragline. That was Dubonet’s word, dragline. Dubonet had come up with the traps and taken Stan to the farmer’s market downtown to beg some fishheads from one of the open-air butcher shops. Stan had been doubtful about the free fishheads, but the big red-faced butcher had just laughed and given them a bucketful. “Good hunting!” the guy yelled.

  You tie fishheads to the netting and throw the hoop out onto some of that greenish yellow stuff, where it would just sit under water, the slow current taking the fish smell out into the stream. Stan had been surprised when he saw actual crayfish crawling toward the heads as advertised. They didn’t get caught in the netting, they just sat there eating fishheads. Dick or Charlie would haul in on the dragline slowly, so as not to dislodge the crayfish. Then the tricky part, picking up the little guys without getting pinched, and throwing them into the live bucket.

  Stan tried to remember all this in as much detail as he could, for a scene in his novel. His cop was going to be a bad guy on every level of his life. Bad cop, bad husband, bad father, bad companion, etc. For the crawfish scene he’d be out on a fishing trip with friends, other cops, honest decent guys who needed this holiday. Only Stan’s guy screws up the trip. He gets too drunk, he gets verbally abusive, he makes fun of one young cop for being such a pussy, generally alienates the very people who are supposed to be on his side.

  What’s the matter with this guy? When Stan began forming the story in his mind the cop was bad just because he was bad, but as he kept thinking of things for him to do, a pattern emerged. The guy was a disappointed idealist. He starts out with the highest ideals, then the real world turns him into a cynic. Stan realized this explanation didn’t cover why this guy took such pleasure out of cracking heads, out of sending the wrong guys up, and realized he wasn’t only a disappointed idealist, he was a sadist. He got a sexual charge out of hurting people. No. The cop was just like Stan, only with more guts. He didn’t really like hurting people, it was the other way around. He was hitting back, only of course he was hitting all the wrong people. He was taking his terrible life out on everybody around him, just as Stan might have done, if he hadn’t been such a weak little punk.

  The crawdad scene never made it in. A better scene occurred to Stan later, the same scene, only at a police picnic, with women and children, and his cop gets drunk and makes a pass at his best friend’s wife. And gets his face busted. And later sends the other cop into a death trap. And then goes and tells the wife she’s a widow, pretending to be terribly upset. What a bastard, Stan thought with pleasure. The more bastardly he is, the more fun to kill him at the end of the book. Stan hadn’t yet decided how.

  He knew if he was to sell it to Fawcett it had to be like the other Gold Medals, fast action, clear straight language, no bullshit. There couldn’t be a lot of deep psychological stuff, as if Stan knew any anyway. But he felt he had to know the guy from the inside, to write about him with confidence. The important thing was the plot. Gold Medal books had ironclad plots, even if most of them fell apart sooner or later. He had to have a strong plot but it didn’t have to be perfect. His would be solid, a real story that could really happen. Just to make it easier to memorize. And blunt dialogue for the same reason.

  The plot became simplicity itself. We meet this cop getting a commendation, being promoted to lieutenant, big ceremony, flags, a band, cops sitting outside on folding chairs. His wife and kids are there in the front row. Proud as punch. Then the ceremony ends, but instead of going home with his family and friends, he goes to the house of his girlfriend, and when she bitches about missing the ceremony, he knocks her on her ass. Each chapter would cover about an hour, the whole book to cover the weekend, between the ceremony and his actually taking over as lieutenant of the burglary detail. Stan set himself the challenge of making each chapter show the cop in a worse and worse light, until the reader is mightily relieved to see him killed, probably by some poor asshole he stepped on or kicked out of the way. Now here was a book that was fun to write.

  The memory part turned out to be easier than he’d expected. In fact, it was the easiest part. Every sentence was like a brick, added to a brick wall. Every sentence had to carry its own weight, and he would lie on his bunk tasting the sentence over and over, until his mind either memorized it, changed it, or dropped it. It was wonderful to wake up in the morning, get through the daily details, then settle back, always with a bit of nervous anxiety, to see if he could still remember what he’d done before. There were fuckups along the way, of course, but soon he had the trick of memorizing whole chapters by chapter title. He didn’t know how it worked, but it worked.

  Not the hard part, no. Nor was the construction of each scene. He wanted everything as visible as possible, because it made things easier to remember, and so he’d build each scene around some visible thing, a shoe, a window-pane, anything to keep the scene in focus. He did the same with characters. Every character had some visible characteristic so Stan could remember who he or she was, hair that sticks up in the back, a cigar smoker, a guy who pulls his left ea
r when he gets nervous. All stolen from real people Stan had known. Memorization was just trickery, he decided.

  The hard part couldn’t be dealt with by trickery. The hard part was that his sympathy for this outright bastard kept growing every day. The worse he made him, the more Stan found excuses for him. At first he left this out, angry at himself for having such sympathy for the devil. Fuck the devil, he’d write his revenge book without any cloying sentimentality. That’s why he liked pulp fiction, none of that silly sentimentality. Yet he couldn’t avoid the truth. The poor bastard had had no more chance than Stan himself. He was still a bastard, and Stan was still going to kill him in the end, but with regret rather than pure pleasure. One thing about this cop, God damn it, he had guts, in a world where having guts just got you shot down. He might have been a thief, he might have been a terrible man in every way you could think of, but somehow he had integrity. He was his own man, and he’d go down, but like a giant. Stan had his ending. Not the means of death, but the end of the book. “Only his daughter cried for him. She was eight.”

  Only his daughter and Stan Winger.

  53.

  After he finished the book in his mind, he did his best to forget it. But of course it would not go away. The book was now called Night Cop, and his cop was named Jack Tesser, aka Jack the Bastard. A real person to Stan now, one Stan wished would go away. All the energy, all the feeling he had put into the book, was now backing up on him, making him crazy to get out of the joint. He woke every morning with nothing to do. Physical exercise could not cut it, even though he was up to six hours of grunting a day. No matter what he turned his mind to, it wouldn’t work. Desperately he tried to think about nothing, but there was no escape left in him.

  The joint eventually ironed him flat. He stopped the daily craze and settled into waiting out the beef. The one thing he did not do was daydream about the future, about when he’d be freed. He knew too many stories about guys who sat in the joint year after year, dreaming over the same jailhouse fantasies, until they were finally let go and blew out of the joint at 180 miles per hour into the nearest brick wall. Not for Stan. Getting out would have to take care of itself. He tried as well not to think about the past, because of course the past was over. Those he’d known on the street were no different people. The sole thing he kept near his heart was the way he’d been treated in Portland. Those were good memories, so long as he didn’t expect be able to recapture any of that. He especially cherished Jaime Monel’s trust. She’d known he was a thief, and yet trusted Stan to care for Kira, to be alone with her. Stan had never told Jaime how much that meant to him. He remembered Kira’s large dark eyes and the way she’d stare at him, mouth open. She was so beautiful, her skin so pure. Stan searched himself many times to see if he had in him the seeds of a child molester, for even a speck of erotic allure in what he felt for Kira, and found none. He’d loved to pick her up, so light in his arms, and carry her around. He remembered carrying her down the slope to Latourette’s pier on Lake Oswego, how confident and strong he’d felt, protecting this child. She’d be eight years old now. She wouldn’t remember him. That would be all right, he’d still love to see her. He was glad now he had no children of his own. Judging from how he felt about Kira, imagine how he’d feel locked up in the joint with a kid of his own running around with no father to protect her. He could cry just thinking of it. It didn’t bother him to cry every once in a while. It let off the feelings.

  Finally they let him out. They asked him where he was going to reside and he pointed vaguely south, so they assigned him a parole officer in San Francisco. They gave him a sweater, pants, shirt, shoes and socks, all jailhouse goods, and forty dollars. They put him on a bus for San Rafael with the other men being released. He sat by himself.

  Stan’s parole officer got him a job working for a non-union painting contractor. Stan had a suspicion that this wasn’t entirely legal and that Morello was getting a kickback, but it was a good job, and the days he worked he spent rollering paint and drinking wine with the other guys, and on the days they didn’t work he stayed in his room and tried to calm down. Getting out of the joint was very emotional for him. He found he’d lost a lot of common skills, such as being able to walk into a restaurant or a store without his face getting so red and congested he felt it would explode. Or getting on a bus. Or talking to a stranger. Very difficult. Feelings going crazy. For Stan it was just another beef to sit out.

  Finally he bought a typewriter and brought it home to Capp Street. He was sure he’d forgotten his book by now, but there might still be other things he could write. The notion of writing a Gold Medal Original was still a good one, and the twenty-five hundred dollars would come in handy. Stan’s room was on the second floor. He set up his typewriter and opened his ream of cheap bond paper. He remembered teaching himself to type in Portland, years ago. He wondered if it would be like riding a bicycle, and it was. Clackety-clack, he knew where all the letters were. No sooner had he started typing a few sentences just for exercise than the guy from downstairs came thundering up the stairs and beat on his door. “Hey, you can’t type in here!” Stan slid back his wooden kitchen chair and went to the door. He opened it and saw the angry face of his downstairs neighbor. A tall thin man with clenched fists and a red face.

  “Fuck you,” Stan said quietly, and shut the door. He sat back down and started typing again. He heard nothing more from his neighbor. His new used typewriter, a Royal Standard, was a good one. Stan like the feel of the keys. Then something stirred, down below his stomach somewhere. Anticipation of something dreadful or wonderful about to happen. He took the paper out of the machine and fed in another sheet. He typed night cop, centered at the top. Double space. Chapter One. He searched his mind for the key word to the first chapter. He typed “Ceremony,” double-spaced, indented, and began to write.

  An hour later he’d written the first chapter. He felt light, but not particularly tired, until he tried to stand up and walk down the hall to the bathroom, when his legs buckled slightly. He pissed, his mind empty, then came back to his room to read what he’d written. He wondered what the hell it would be. As he read it over the hairs on the back of his neck rose. Spooky. The first chapter read beautifully. It was as he remembered it.

  The trick would be to make the rest of the chapters come out the same way. He wondered what part of his ritual was necessary, and what parts were not. Did it always have to be this time of day? Would he need his neighbor to come up and bitch at him? He didn’t know. But every day when he wasn’t called to paint, he wrote, and in a few weeks the book was done, on paper, only waiting for him to get up the guts to send it in. He read it over twice, making hand corrections as neatly as possible. Was he living in a dream? No, it seemed to him a good, fast-paced action yarn. The only possible problem being that it didn’t have a hero, only an anti-hero. That was okay, the pulps did that sometimes. He would just have to take his chances.

  He waited three more weeks before sending it in, just enough time to really learn to hate painting houses. He thought about sending it to Robert P. Mills, the agent who’d helped him, but no. He’d call Mills if and when his book was accepted. Fat chance. But he sent it anyway, and heard back with amazing speed, three weeks. He’d expected to wait at least a month, maybe more. But here was a letter from Knox Burger, editor of the Gold Medal Original series, saying they’d accepted his novel, they had a few changes they wanted to discuss, and please call. There was also a check for thirty-two hundred dollars and a four-page contract. With his neck hairs up he went down to the corner bar and made a toll call to New York.

  “That’s the best fucking manuscript I’ve read in years!” Burger yelled at him over the phone. “Why don’t you come to New York? We could use a man like you on the staff.”

  “Uh, okay,” Stan said.

  54.

  Of course he could not come to New York. He was a parolee. Morello told him he could not so much as raise up to fart without permission, and he wasn’t giving his p
ermission. In fact, Morello seemed irritated that Stan had sold a book and made so much money. When Stan said he was going to quit house painting and write full time, Morello snapped, “Writing isn’t regular employment. You quit your job, you’re very close to being violated right back into San Quentin.” But Stan sensed that Morello was only being grumpy. He went ahead and quit painting and moved into a nicer apartment in the same building, one with its own toilet. Capp Street was close to Mission, shopping, bars, and best of all, lots of people walking around freely.

  Stan didn’t actually have to know people, or talk to them. It was enough to sit among them, or walk along unnoticed, relaxed, not prying, just listening to the way ordinary people talked. It was comforting, and helped him get used to being free. At home in his apartment, freedom wasn’t going so well. Back in the joint he’d made some resolutions, one of which was that he not masturbate. The point wasn’t moral. It was supposed to help him get into some kind of normal relationship with a woman. He reasoned that if he jacked off all the time or went to hookers he just put off the time when he’d enter the normal world. Now he found it very difficult to stick to this resolution. Since he’d been locked up, the kind of magazines they sold in stores had changed. You could go into a store and buy outright pornography, take it home and jack off to your heart’s content. And hookers were everywhere. He’d never seen so many hookers. The temptation was great, but he managed to resist it. Maybe he was just too shy.