Fridays at Enrico's

by Don Carpenter

  He poured his sexual energy into writing, or at least that’s how he liked to think of it. Where the sexual energy actually went he didn’t know. He wrote every day. His new book, another Gold Medal Original, he hoped, was about a couple of funny happy-go-lucky kids who go on a run after getting out of juvenile. They rob, steal, get drunk, get laid, crack jokes, steal a police car, etc., until at the end of the book the two buddies end up cellmates in prison. Another anti-hero story, but this time he tried to get into the state of mind when you go on a criminal run, that high, light, brilliant, carefree mood, nothing in your veins but pure adrenaline. He called his book The Run, and it took him six weeks to write. He thought about sending it to Bob Mills to see if they could get more money for it, but he knew Gold Medal paid a flat fee, so what was the point? He had a good relationship with Knox Burger, who insisted he call him collect anytime, and his first book was due out any day now. Stan mailed off the second one without calling Knox, and went into a state of nervous collapse the minute the damned thing was in the mail. He walked out of the Rincon Annex post office knowing he’d mailed off a dud, wishing he had the brains to go over the thing once more.

  He knew why he’d thrown himself so convulsively into the new writing. His old bag was opening up right in front of him. He couldn’t walk down the street without thinking the thoughts of a burglar, seeing signs of an empty house, feeling the tickle in his gut, the lightheaded desire to cut the civilized knot and penetrate some invitingly empty home. He was through with that, but he could still feel it. Someday he might get drunk or see a beautiful woman turn up her nose at him, then slide out of control back into the joint.

  The letter from Knox Burger was too soon to be a reaction to his new manuscript. His heart sank as he ripped the envelope open. What the fuck could this be? But it was unbelievably good news. Fawcett had sold the film rights to Night Cop to Universal Pictures for forty-five thousand dollars. Of which ninety percent was Stan’s. Knox had scrawled in pencil at the bottom of the note, “Think maybe you cd afford a phone?”

  Morello looked angry, then defeated. Stan asked his permission to move to Los Angeles and Morello just shrugged and reached for a Form 24. Stan had no plan. He just wanted to be near Hollywood, in case anybody wanted him to work on the screenplay of his book. And to get away from Morello, who was too emotional about being a parole officer. Stan had an ambition to write for the movies. Even television. He hadn’t allowed himself to think about this, it seemed so remote. Now, maybe it wasn’t out of reach.

  The best part was buying a car. Charlie Monel had taught him how to drive years ago in Portland, but now to get his license he went to a driving school out on Geary and let a pretty college girl teach him all over again, then take him down to the Department of Motor Vehicles for his license. Then, with his temporary license in his pocket, he went into his branch of the Bank of America and withdrew three thousand in cash. He knew the car he wanted to buy. A pale blue 1961 Cadillac convertible, with a cream-colored top and a tinted windshield. It was sitting in the front row of a used car lot on Mission, and the sign in the car’s window said, “A steal at thirty-five hundred.”

  Stan walked the ten blocks to the lot. It was a nice sunny day, and he was wearing a white tee shirt and Levi’s. He looked like a guy who might work in a gas station or car wash, an ordinary low-class guy, looking over the big expensive machines he obviously couldn’t afford. He walked around the car of his choice, looking for tiny flaws. He tried the door. Locked. There were three salesmen standing near the white shack at the back of the lot. Stan waved at them but they neither waved back nor came over. They think I’m wasting their time, he thought with pleasure. He reached into his pocket and took out his huge wad of money, thirty hundred-dollar bills, fanned them as best he could, and held them up, waving them gently. That got their attention. The salesmen said something to each other, then one of them, a big Mexican-looking guy in a plaid suit, came over, a small smile on his face.

  “Like what you see?” he asked.

  “I’d like to get inside.” The guy unlocked the door and Stan climbed behind the wheel. “I’ll give you three for it right now,” he said, after his test drive.

  The Mexican-looking salesman said, “It’s three and a half.” He grinned at Stan. “You can afford it.”

  Stan smiled at the salesman, who was every salesman he had ever met in his life. “Three is my final offer,” he said, and started to get out of the car.

  “Three, did you say?” the salesman said with a smile.

  Stan drove south on another sunny day, his top down, sunglasses protecting his eyes from the glare, everything he owned in the trunk. He drove down 101 because he wanted to see the countryside, and near the Monterey turnoff he picked up a girl hitchhiker. There were lots of hitchhikers on the road these days. The girl he stopped for couldn’t have been over seventeen, washed-out blonde hair, a long dress made of some kind of velvet, an old army combat jacket, lots of wooden beads. The girl was stoned.

  “Where to?” Stan asked her after they got rolling.

  “I don’t much care,” she said.

  After a while he said, “Are you running away from home or something?”

  She turned toward him. Her eyes were bloodshot. “You wanna get loaded?” she asked. She pulled out a joint and lit it with the car lighter, sucked in a lot of smoke, and handed it to Stan. Up until now, he’d committed no criminal act. Not since he got out of the joint. Unless you counted jaywalking. He took the joint and sucked in a lungful.

  “We could stop at a motel,” she said after a while. “You got bread? We could eat takeout food. I’m really hungry.”

  “Me too,” said Stan happily. The hippie girl spent the night with him. She ate like a wolf and then, when it was time for bed, said, “I think I have a disease, but I’ll blow you.”

  “That’s fine,” Stan said. The next morning he fed her again, this time in the motel coffee shop. While they ate their eggs he told her he was going to Los Angeles. Her name was Serene. “You wanna come along, uh, Serene?”

  They were in Santa Barbara. “I have friends in Goleta,” she said. “I think I’ll go hang out with them.”

  “I can take you. I’m in no hurry.”

  She smiled. She wasn’t very pretty, but she had a nice smile. “You’re sweet,” she said. “But I can make it on my own, if you’ll just loan me fifty dollars. I could really use the bread.”

  Driving on to Los Angeles, Stan figured he had already committed enough crimes on this little trip to net him about a hundred and fifty years in prison. But there you are.

  55.

  Three weeks later he was all set up with a rental house in San Fernando Valley, a block off Laurel Canyon Boulevard. The house was furnished and had a nice big fenced backyard with swimming pool, trees, a patch of lawn and some white-painted cast-iron garden furniture with a glass-topped table and a striped umbrella. The little house was cool and dark inside, too big for Stan with two bedrooms and two baths, but he couldn’t resist. His first home. He had a lot of Hollywood money burning a hole in his pocket. The real estate lady made him feel like a cheapskate, babbling about all the high-priced properties she wanted to show him up in the hills. This place was just fine.

  He’d been putting off calling Knox Burger until he was all settled, but now he could put it off no longer. He really had no faith in himself, he decided. He was afraid his second book wasn’t quite as good as the first. It had been more fun to write, but that was partly what made him suspicious. Maybe he’d never make his living as a writer, had just had a lucky first sale, that was all. He called Burger, sitting straight up in his little breakfast nook in his sunny kitchen, looking out his window at the cool blue of his own pool, while some bird sang a long complicated song.

  “Stan, where the hell are you?”

  He told Burger his address and telephone number, and waited nervously for the axe to fall. But all he heard was good news. Five copies of Night Cop would be mailed to him that day, it
looked good, maybe a little garish. Stan asked nervously how it was selling and was told those figures would not be made available. There was no royalty rate for a Gold Medal Original, so there would be no accounting. But the really good news was that the new book was accepted, and a check for thirty-four hundred dollars would be sent instantly.

  “That’s great,” Stan said, feeling a little deflated. Would good news always depress him? Who knew? “What about movie rights?” he heard himself saying.

  Burger chuckled. “You went Holly wood real fast, didn’t you?”

  “Why not?” Stan said, embarrassed.

  “You said it!” Knox was enthusiastic, but he didn’t handle film rights. In fact, he didn’t seem to have any advice for Stan about getting the job of writing his own screenplay. “Just call the studio,” he said. “Tell ’em who you are. See what happens.”

  “Okay.” Stan’s big move to Hollywood seemed stupid, another crazy criminal run. Sure, he was going to break into the movies. That’s what they all thought, the poor saps who wrote books.

  But he did call Universal. The telephone operator wanted to be helpful, but she was unable to tell him which of the dozens of producers on the lot had his project. He hadn’t realized Universal was a collection of producers. He’d assumed they’d know what books they had bought, but no. He hung up irritated, feeling like the dupe of all time. He called Knox Burger back. Burger was out of the office. Stan was polite to the secretary and hung up the phone gently, then said “Shit,” to his empty house.

  It was the same with his swimming pool. He’d been looking forward to his first dip, and had included the pool in his exercise plans. He’d rise early every morning and step out his bedroom sliding doors to the pool, jump in, swim laps. Then emerge, dry himself on his big new beach towel, and have his breakfast right out here in the morning sunshine. A bigger contrast to C Block he could not imagine. Trouble was, on that first morning when he stepped out through the sliding doors, he suddenly felt cold and shy, his arms crossed over his naked chest, feet cold against the rough bricks of his patio. He looked around. His garden was completely fenced with grape stake, and thick shrubbery grew on both sides. Nobody wanted to watch him. He was alone under the light blue morning sky. The water looked cold. He’d always wanted a pool, but he hadn’t realized they took so much maintenance. A heater, hidden behind some shrubs, a pool net on a long handle for fishing out leaves, and once a month the pool man would come and maintain things at a cost of fifteen dollars a month. Stan wanted to jump in, but his body wouldn’t. It just stood there getting colder. The first time he’d jumped in a river it was the Columbia, at Rooster Rock, a million years ago. He’d been drunk, so when a bunch of guys jumped in he followed, and damn near drowned, the current sucking him downstream with astonishing strength. He had to fight to make it back to shore. Of course he hadn’t said anything. People would have laughed at him, so naïve about rivers.

  He walked back into the house, his face red. Fixing breakfast in his own kitchen cheered him up. He’d always eaten food prepared by others and now would begin cooking for himself, starting small with breakfast and lunch, but eventually graduating to making dinners, instead of eating alone somewhere in a restaurant. The first morning, he had fried eggs and toast. Both of which he fucked up. He kept his butter in the refrigerator, and when the toast popped up he whacked off a chunk of butter and tore the toast in half with it. “Shit,” he said, and put the torn toast on a plate while he cooked the eggs. He used his Revere Ware frying pan with the copper bottom, and maybe too much butter, and the eggs fried hard around the edges but were still runny. Not the way he liked them. He ate his cold torn toast and sloppy eggs in his breakfast nook, instead of outside where the birds could laugh at him.

  He finally got Knox late that afternoon. He called from a bar named the Lion’s Head, in a pretty good mood. “The guy to talk to at Universal is a chap named Fishkin. Bud Fishkin. He works for Andrei Kelos.”

  “Who’s Andrei Kelos?”

  “That’s your director,” Knox said. “I’m not sure of these facts, but give ’em a call.”

  Stan waited until eleven the next morning. This time he wasn’t so hyped up. “Bud Fishkin please,” he said.

  “Bud Fishkin,” the operator said, and put him through.

  “Bud Fishkin,” a woman’s voice said.

  “I’d like to speak to, uh, Mister Fishkin?”

  “May I ask what in regard to?”

  “Uh, Night Cop?”

  There was a pause. “Are you acquainted with Mister Fishkin?”

  Stan’s ears started to heat up. “I wrote Night Cop,” he said.

  “Oh, the book,” she said. “One moment.”

  Stan waited nearly five minutes, then heard a deep male voice, smooth, rich, a really nice voice.

  “I’m so happy you called,” said Bud Fishkin. “I think you’re one of the finest young talents in America, and if we don’t get together on this project, it would be a crying shame. What are you doing for lunch?”

  “Nothing,” Stan said.

  56.

  They met at a little health food restaurant in Studio City. Stan hadn’t known what to wear so he showed up in Levi’s and a blue work shirt, just about what he wore in the joint. Might as well be straightforward. He felt comfortable right away, because the woman with the menus was dressed in cutoff jeans and a Hawaiian shirt tied up showing her stomach. She gave him a dazzling smile and a menu.

  “Uh, Mister Fishkin is expecting me,” he said, and she took him to Fishkin sitting at a back table.

  “I’m trying to lose a few pounds,” Bud Fishkin said as Stan sat down. He was a handsome man with large dark eyes and dark hair, looking more like an Arab than a Jew, as far as Stan was concerned. Sleek rather than fat, he was dressed in a beautiful dark blue suit. “Let me order for you,” Fishkin said, and ordered smoothies for both of them. “Don’t ask what’s in it,” he said. “It’s healthy.”

  “I’ve been doing my own cooking,” Stan said. The lack of formality seemed bizarre, but this was Hollywood. “Not very well.”

  “My wife loves to cook,” said Fishkin. “But we have a maid.” He looked around the room. “These are all television people. Recognize anybody?”

  Stan admitted he did not watch television.

  “Where have you been, on the moon?” Fishkin smiled. “I don’t watch much either. The idea of sweating and straining over a picture, and then having it show up on that tiny little screen, makes my bowels itch.” He shrugged. “That’s the fate of everything now. Television. Get used to it.”

  Their smoothies came, and Stan was surprised to see that it was like a milkshake. “It’s got yeast and all kinds of healthy shit in it,” Fishkin said, reading his expression. He sipped his own and made a little face. “Okay, pal, you want to know about your project. Do you know the work of Andrei Kelos? No? He’s a director.” Fishkin named three movies and seemed amazed that Stan hadn’t seen any of them. “Don’t you go to the movies either?”

  “I’ve been in jail for a while,” Stan admitted. Bud Fishkin dabbed at his mouth with his white napkin, clearly surprised.

  “Jail?”

  “Well, prison. San Quentin.” He explained that he’d written Night Cop in the joint. Fishkin sat back with a look of theatrical amazement on his face.

  “Andrei is going to love this.” He immediately put a hand on Stan’s. “Don’t get me wrong. Listen, Andrei read your book flying to London, he’s nuts about it. He wants to make it in black and white, fast, snap snap snap, no stars, almost a documentary. But he’s gonna love it that you’re an ex-con, please, don’t get me wrong, but in this particular circumstance it’s a positive.”

  Stan grinned at Fishkin. He liked this guy. “For me,” he said with a little smile, “being out is the positive.” They both laughed so loud people at other tables looked at them. Bud put a finger to his lips.

  “People are taping us at this very moment,” he said. “I’m joking, but you never
know. Anyway, tell me about prison. No, I mean, if you want to talk about it.”

  “I don’t.” Stan didn’t really mind, but he didn’t want to seem boastful or arrogant. Better to pose as the strong silent type.

  “Anyway, Andrei’s going to love you.” Fishkin waved for the waitress. “Would you like to come to the lot? We could talk in my office, between phone calls. I have a great idea. Who’s your agent?”

  “I don’t have one yet.”

  “We’ll get you one. Then we’ll see if we can’t get the studio to buy you as screenwriter.” He smiled obscenely. “We’ll tell ’em you’re an ex-con.”

  “Is that a good idea?”

  Fishkin patted his arm. “In this town? You bet!”

  Out in the parking lot under the hot sun, Fishkin was giving Stan directions to follow him to Universal, when Stan belched. “It wasn’t the smoothie,” he apologized. “I couldn’t get my eggs to cook right this morning.”

  “Eggs? What kind of stove do you have?”

  Stan told him electric, and Fishkin held up a finger. “That explains it. What you need, my friend, is a gas stove.” So instead of going over to Universal, Stan left his car baking in the sun outside the health food restaurant while he and Bud Fishkin drove through a maze of freeways to a place in Glendale, a storefront with brown paper on the windows and an old sign saying “Reopening Soon.” All the way over Fishkin had talked about the Los Angeles Dodgers while Stan pretended he understood or cared. When they got to the storefront Fishkin said, “Let me do the talking, okay?” and took him into what Stan recognized as a hot merchandise drop. His first Hollywood contact had brought him directly to a fence. For the purpose of buying him a gas stove. Stan leaned against an old desk with his hands in his pockets as Fishkin talked to the two guys working the place. Both guys Stan recognized as a thief. They didn’t give each other the office or anything, but the recognition was there. Maybe Hollywood wasn’t going to be so hard to deal with after all.