Fridays at Enrico's

by Don Carpenter

  “It’s about winning over evil,” said Fishkin.

  “I doesn’t sound much like my book,” Charlie said. Fishkin raised an eyebrow.

  “Really? Describe your novel in one sentence. The sentence you’d see later in TV Guide.”

  Charlie thought a moment, then said thoughtfully, “A bunch of assholes get caught in a war.”

  “I love it!” said Fishkin.

  67.

  Jaime loved North Beach in the mornings. It was like a Mediterranean village on a hill, bright clean blue sky, empty streets and narrow alleyways. Jaime liked to get up with the sun, shower, dress, and walk down the hill to the Caffe Trieste for an espresso with chocolate sprinkled on it, perhaps a brioche if she didn’t have too bad a hangover. The place at that hour was always busy, people standing at the little counter arguing in Sicilian or Italian with the people behind the counter, scavengers out on the street in front, having their espressos after a hard morning picking up San Francisco’s garbage. Jaime loved these people. They knew her, at least by sight, and nearly every morning the young men out front would say things about her in Italian and laugh. It had taken years for her to be served promptly inside. She was never sure whether this was because she wasn’t Italian or wasn’t male. But now they’d start her espresso right away, singing out, “Jaime! Brioche today?” while others waited impatiently. Then she’d sit with her back to the window and read whatever paper was lying around, smelling the hot chocolate, the Italian cigar smoke, hearing the hissing of the espresso machines and the loud conversations all around her. It was her daily moment of humanity before returning to isolation and work.

  With Charlie in Hollywood Jaime had to interrupt her routine and go home to Mill Valley to be with her daughter. Jaime couldn’t write at home with Charlie there, which broke her heart. Charlie would be so considerate of her privacy and her need for a smooth quiet routine, always offering his own office, but all that self-sacrifice on his part made her too sad to work. How could she explain this to Charlie without hurting him? “I can’t work here because you’re a failure.” She assumed Charlie understood, but it was a little catch between them, one more thing they couldn’t be open about. They mounted up, these silent catches.

  When Charlie flew to L.A. Jaime had two choices, go home to work, or bring Kira to the city. She feared leaving Kira to wander around North Beach while she wrote. Kira was not only too tall for her age, she was too smart, too curious, to self-reliant. So Jaime went home. It was supposed to be for the one night, but Charlie called up and said he’d been invited out to Malibu for the weekend. “To talk shop,” he said, without a trace of humor, so she was stuck for three days. She brought her manuscript and her Hermes portable, but Kira seemed to have decided that she wouldn’t let her mother work. On Friday they drove to Stinson Beach and walked along the wet sand looking for sea shells. Kira seemed to know the names of all the shells, green rock oysters, purple-hinged scallops, sand dollars, turban snails, etc. and etc., always running ahead of her mother and picking up whatever glittered, discarding the imperfect shells and putting the others into her pants pockets. There were dogs on the beach, and Kira ran and played with the dogs, although she claimed she didn’t want a dog of her own. She’d been told she’d have to take care of any pets, so she’d said, typical Kira, “Then I don’t want any.” Yet her room was full of dead butterflies, dragonflies, dried mushrooms, pictures of wolves and hawks, as well as the usual stuffed animals and children’s books.

  Jaime had never been happy with Charlie’s quitting writing. She understood his terrible pain when he had to reject publication of a butchered version, Bill Ratto’s vain attempt to play Maxwell Perkins, but she expected after a year or so of working as a bartender Charlie would come to his senses and get back to his desk. But no. After all these years he seemed perfectly content to tend bar and support her writing, as if he were secondary in their marriage. She knew better. This Hollywood thing really worried her, Ratto again, not letting Charlie get on with his life. Another battering for Charlie, coming up.

  But when she met him at the airport Charlie was explosively cheerful. “Jesus H. Christ, it’s good to be back in San Francisco!” he said. “You can’t imagine what that fucking place is like. You can’t even rub your eyes.” But the energy bubbling up out of him had a different source, she was certain. That night, lying in the darkness after making love, he talked quietly about his visit, about what these producers had in mind and how he felt about it.

  “I think I can beat these guys. They’re not dumb or anything, but it’s so obvious what they want.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “They want to win.” He put his hand on her stomach and rubbed her gently. “I love your stomach,” he said.

  “And I love yours,” she said. “How do you beat them? If they’re so set on winning?”

  “By helping them win,” Charlie said. He chuckled as if he had discovered a great secret.

  He really wanted to try Hollywood. Her own bad experiences made her hate the business, though she’d made money. Never again would she sell a book outright. Her first and possibly her best, certainly the most widely read of her books, was now buried under the corpse of Joseph E. Levine, late of Embassy Pictures, then Avco-Embassy, and now God knows what corporate monstrosity. And she’d been so thoroughly rolled by the television people who’d optioned Judy Bell that she automatically wanted to vomit when she heard the words, “I have great news!”

  When they met, Charlie had seem relaxed about political ideas. “I got my Marxism from a different nipple,” he said, laughing at those who hoped to save the world. Then Vietnam came rudely in everyone’s lives, and she and Charlie stood outdoors with ten thousand people at a Berkeley soccer field listening to Dick Gregory and Norman Mailer exhorting them all to defiance. They’d cheered that day with the rest, but after a while Charlie got disenchanted with the anti-war movement. “They’re attacking troop trains,” he told her. “Fuck ’em.”

  “But those soldiers—” she started.

  “Those soldiers have no choice,” he said.

  They were in the Coffee Gallery, drinking ale. “They could choose civil disobedience,” Jaime insisted. She’d read Thoreau, knew what she was talking about.

  “Civil disobedience is something you do alone,” he said mysteriously.

  He was against the war and against the war-resisters. No man’s land for Charlie. He’d never killed anybody, but he’d tried. She feared what might be going on under the surface, though he was nearly always his old cheery helpful self. You can’t spend ten years of your life writing a novel without leaving a lot of yourself in it. Each book is like a child, not just in a metaphor but in your heart, and a bad fate for your child hurts terribly. Charlie was very badly wounded, and Jaime wasn’t at all sure what effect Hollywood might have on her damaged hero.

  68.

  Jaime called her friend Susan Beskie at the Zeigler-Ross Agency, who handled her for dramatic rights, and asked her to look into Charlie’s possible deal with Ratto. Jaime had never actually met Susan and imagined her as tall and thin, with steel-rimmed glasses and short straight hair. Her voice was high and thin, more reassuring to Jaime than a sensual voice might have been. And she was an enthusiastic agent, wanting to help Jaime finally get rich from her writing.

  “My husband wrote a novel a long time ago,” Jaime began. She told her about The End of the War and Bill Ratto’s interest in making it into a movie. “Do you know Bill Ratto?” she asked.

  “Oh yes,” Susan said. She said she’d look into it and get back to Jaime, but it was Evarts Ziegler who called at a little after six. He sounded tired. He asked for Charlie, and when Jaime said he wasn’t home, Ziegler said, “Ask him to call me. I think we can work something out.”

  Charlie made the call the next morning, impatient for ten o’clock, when the agencies opened. He couldn’t eat his breakfast, and went into the yard to walk up and down with his hands behind his back. He’s combative, Jaime though
t. He really wants to get into this. She wasn’t sure this made her happy. Anything, sure, to get him out of bartending, but Hollywood was the virtual center of broken dreams. Maybe that was what drew him.

  “You could call it ‘Private Lazarus’,” she said at lunch. She and Charlie and Kira were having a rare lunch together, in honor of Ziegler’s agreement to “look into” Charlie’s deal. They were on the deck of the Trident, watching the sailboats on the bay.

  “‘Sergeant Lazarus,’” he corrected with a smile.

  “I’m getting jealous,” she said.

  “What about?” Kira asked. She was eating a gigantic hamburger.

  “Daddy’s going to Hollywood,” Mommy said.

  “I’m not kidding myself,” Charlie said to Jaime. “I know what they want. A nice big splashy war movie, with an anti-war message.”

  “Isn’t that what you want?” Jaime asked.

  A man of about thirty with long greasy dark hair and an American flag shirt came grinning up to them, especially at Kira. “Charlie,” the guy said, “Where’d you get this one?”

  Kira looked up at the man briefly and then back down at her hamburger. Charlie smiled, though Jaime could tell he was angry. “This is my daughter,” he said.

  “Hey, great,” the guy said, his eyes still on Kira. Then the message seemed to get through, and he backed away. “Oh,” he said.

  Charlie watched him leave the deck. “Probably a little stoned,” he said, irritated. “I want to make the movie right,” he said. “And it can still be a big splashy war movie and make a fortune. Only no John Wayne.”

  Jaime was surprised. “They want John Wayne?”

  Charlie laughed. “His people probably won’t even call back. You know, they didn’t say a word to me about an agent.”

  “Don’t get paranoid.”

  Charlie smiled at her, but there was something wrong with his face. “You know that Buddhist line about desiring causing suffering?” She nodded. “I really did put my novel away. I was finished with it. I stopped desiring, I really did. You know, like the fucking TB. You lay there spitting up blood like Old Faithful, and you tell yourself it will either end or you’ll die first. It’s the will to live that fucks you up. You have to give up on that, and I did. The reason I made it was because I didn’t care. You know what I mean?”

  “I do,” Kira said.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” Charlie said to his daughter. “I didn’t mean to talk like this in front of you.”

  Kira gave Jaime a look that said Men.

  So they’d brought his desire back to life, Jaime understood. Charlie had been in suspended animation, because the only thing he really wanted had been denied him. And now it was again being offered, by what kind of under-the-rock Hollywood scum she didn’t know. She couldn’t protect Charlie. She couldn’t even protect herself. Not from this stuff.

  The call came the next morning at eight-twenty, so Evarts Ziegler got to the office early when he needed to. Charlie took the call in his office and came out with sweat on his forehead.

  “What’s up?” she asked.

  Charlie sat at the dining room table with Jaime and tapped his finger on the tablecloth in a very irritating manner. He sighed and Jaime waited. “Well,” he said finally, “I’m guess maybe I’m gonna go down there for a while.”

  Jaime was surprised. “You mean move to Hollywood?”

  He raised his eyebrows defensively. “What should I do?” Ratto and Fishkin had offered Charlie fifteen hundred per week for six weeks, renewable to twelve, to come south and work with them on a script. “What is that?” he asked her.

  “It’s either nine or eighteen grand,” she said. “And you won’t have to give it back.”

  “We could use the money.”

  “We sure could.”

  “Why do I feel so stupid?” Charlie asked her. Kira came into the room at that moment, dressed in her blue and black bathing suit, which was too loose around the leg holes, giving her a raffish look. She was getting so tall. She heard Charlie’s last remark and waited for Jaime’s answer. But Jaime didn’t have one.

  They drove Charlie to the airport, Kira scrunched up in the back seat. Jaime was upset, but Kira was really upset. On the way back to Marin County Kira announced that she, too, wished to move to Los Angeles.

  “I hate Marin,” she said. “Everyone’s so perfect. I was thinking about moving to San Francisco with you and going to school there. But this is better. I can live with Daddy and go to Hollywood High.”

  “I doubt you’d like Los Angeles,” Jaime said like a true parent.

  “It’s not Los Angeles so much,” Kira said.

  “What do you mean?”

  Kira explained that she preferred her father to her mother. “If you ever split up,” she said. “I want to go with him.”

  69.

  Kenny Goss was having problems.

  He’d become Charlie’s friend, hanging out at the no name bar when his ship was in port. Kenny had worked aboard the Breckenridge for nearly five years, steadily writing the whole time, but getting nowhere. At first he’d tried short stories, but no one would buy them or even comment on them except to send him printed rejection slips. He had no idea what he was doing wrong, or even if he was doing wrong. Maybe he was doing right, and they were wrong. He couldn’t know. After a while he put his heart in his mouth and showed a story to Charlie, handing it to him right across the bar. “See what you think,” was all he could say. The respect Charlie showed was at least encouraging. “I’ll put these with my coat,” he said, and carefully carried the manuscript into the back room. He said he’d read the story that night.

  “What do you want to hear?” he asked.

  Kenny was surprised. “What you think,” he said. “Not praise,” he added, and Charlie nodded.

  “Good,” he said.

  Kenny went home across the bridge, to his little apartment at Jackson and Larkin, over the Chinese laundry. Usually he wrote at night, but with Charlie reading his story he couldn’t. By 4:00 a.m. he was certain Charlie would tell him to stop writing. He didn’t really know why Charlie’s opinion mattered to him. Charlie had never published anything. But he had a good mind. Kenny’d never met a bartender with a better mind.

  Charlie smiled and said, “I can see what’s wrong right away.” He handed Kenny his pages, and Kenny automatically rolled them in his hands.

  “Bad stuff,” Kenny said, nodding.

  “No, you asshole. Your work is beautiful. But it’s too intricate.”

  “Intricate?” He’d never thought of his work as intricate.

  “I don’t mean too intricate,” Charlie said. “I mean too intricate for the people you’re showing it to. Playboy isn’t going to buy a story about a guy who’s obsessed with the sound of his own blood. They probably wouldn’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  Writing is really strange, Kenny thought. You can write and write and never know what the hell you’re doing. He hadn’t written a story about a guy who was obsessed with the sound of his own blood. He’d written about how fascinating it is to listen to your own blood.

  “Why don’t you write for children?” Charlie asked, and changed Kenny’s life. It was as if his whole life had been just a little off-register until now, when Charlie touched it into place. Children. Of course. They were the only ones he trusted. They were the ones he would write for. He and Charlie stared at each other over the bar. Kenny searched his mind for words.

  “Aren’t I too intricate for children?” he asked.

  “Oh, hell no,” Charlie said easily, and moved off to fix a drink for somebody.

  Later Charlie introduced Kenny to his wife and, as they sat in front of the bar drinking beer on a Sunday afternoon, they discovered a common thread between them. Kenny had helped Jaime’s mother, long ago, when her father died and her mother had to sell all her stuff. She would have been ripped off if it hadn’t been for Kenny, and he was proud of what he’d done.

  “My mother told
me somebody helped her,” Jaime said, and touched him on the wrist. “That some marvelous person had come out of nowhere to save her from the vultures.” She gave him a beautiful smile. “My mother will be so happy to know I’ve met you,” she said. She explained that her mother had married and was living in a place called Troutdale, east of Portland. After that, any time Kenny saw Jaime in Sausalito or North Beach they would get together like old buddies. Karma, Kenny thought. I did a good thing and now I’m getting it back. Because he loved Jaime. She could really write.

  And she confirmed Charlie’s opinion on his work. “You’re great!” she said, and immediately begged Kenny to let her send something of his to a children’s book editor at Harper & Row, just to show the kind of writer he was. The editor wrote back enthusiastically, and launched Kenny into his first deliberate children’s book. But once he’d made clear to himself who his audience was, the writing became more difficult. He liked children. They didn’t bullshit you. Not the little ones. So there was this terrible obligation not to bullshit them. For Kenny it was a credo: No Bullshit.

  Another change came into his life when he decided he finally couldn’t stomach another week out on the sandbar. Working aboard the dredge wasn’t just boring, it was maddening, and though the money and hours were excellent, better than he could do elsewhere, Kenny finally quit. Now he had a future. But in order to live without plundering his savings, he looked for and got a job in the book business, this time working for a rare bookstore specializing in Western Americana. Instead of going around looking for books in Goodwills and people’s houses, Kenny spent his days looking through warehouses and estate sales, not so much looking for sleepers as cataloging, examining for condition, and pricing.

  Just as bad a job as dredging sand, except for one thing. His boss, Calvin Whipple, who’d been doing the same kind of work all his life, first for his grandfather and then for his father and now for himself, kept a large fishbowl brandy glass on his desk about half full of white pills. Kenny was welcome to take as many as he wanted. The pills kept you alert, and at first naïve Kenny had thought they were NoDoz or some other caffeine stuff. They certainly helped with the work, but then he had trouble writing nights unless he took a pill first, and then he found that instead of getting four or five hours of sleep at night, he got none. He’d work all day, go home and write all night, then shower, eat some white sugar or something, and head up for work again. On his days off he’d drive over to Sausalito in his old white Chevy pickup and try to relax, drinking beer and looking out the window at the tourists. He told himself he was looking for girls, but since the advent of the little white pills he’d not been horny, and all he was really trying to do was drink enough beer to make him sleepy.